Maize eyespot - it's about!

29/07/2010 near Bridgrule.

The recent cooler, wet weather has brought about the emergence of this distructive disease again, the difference being that most maize is now chest or shoulder height, some taller, making spraying difficult. Still, better to be preventative whilst you can, rather than sorry later, so if you see anyting looking like this in your maize, get it protected.

Well established in maize near Holsworthy. 23/07/2010

Early symptoms - 22/07/2010

In a field near Exeter Airport- 22/07/2010

Maize 2010 so far.

Cold, dry and a late start for many, although fortune so far has favoured the brave who planted early, got the crop started with the moisture that was already in the soil and then got rain just when needed to push the crops on. The predicted frost damage on early drilled fields has not yet materialised down here, even where drilled on the 16th of April when we had a week of hard frosts at the beginning of May.

16th April, Petrockstowe.

Beethoven with it's fantastic early vigour has lead the pack in the trials right from the start, although Lorado in the last ten days has really started a serious growth spurt and has caught it up in terms of stature.

24th May, Pertockstowe

3rd June, Bude.

A lot of crops with average vigour have needed a trace element/foliar spray to get them growing in the very dry conditions, especially those planted in May which weren't able to get a big enough root area before the sun and dry weather started to make life difficult for the small plants.

Contrary to MGA advice about cloddy seedbeds being OK, this has proved to be bad advice on heavier ground this year with very poor germination and plant counts where these types of seedbeds have been found. This may be OK on light loams and sands, but not on heavier clay loams in Devon and Cornwall. Compaction too has been a real issue on ground that was compacted in the wet last autumn with the tracks stil being visible this year, even after numerous passes with subsoilers and cultivators.

Compaction.....!

Going on growth stages, this year the crop on average is about 10 days ahead of where it was at the same time last year with a crop of Beethoven near Bude over 6ft tall at the end of June!

25th June, Petrockstowe.

Beethoven 30th June, Bude!

Frost heave/lift on winter corn.

Above is Nickerson Original Alchemy in very heavy claggy clays at Whitstone, near Launceston which came through the winter without much suffereing, even though there was standing water that froze here. Below is Original Istabraq at Ashwater, again no issues with the very hard frost and wet this last winter.


Contrast this above with this below of other seed, with the effects seen though in later growth stages.

Seen a lot of this this year after the very cold winter, following a very wet Autumn where late drilled wheat suffered badly.

Yellow rust in Devon

Yellow Rust is very active in the untreated variety trial site run by Nickerson at Silverton near Exeter.

For those who thought this was not a disease of concern in the south west, please be aware this is no longer the case. On the back of growing susceptable varieties in this area, the disease has migrated southwards into the region and growers must appreciate that all untreated areas (those around field corners, hedgerows, pylons, electricity poles etc) will be hot spots for the disease to flourish in and spread from making the risk greater in future.

Full details can be seen at the Farmers Weekly Rust Watch page.

Grain Maize at Bude, Cornwall.

Bude is one of the few places in Cornwall and Devon that grain maize can be grown without the excessive cost of using plastic to force the crop. It is not a favourable area in the NIAB/MGA sense at all though, so site choice is crucial as wind is a major factor in any site being considered for growing grain maize.

Below photo's of Lorado 2 weeks off combining, or when combining should have been done! Photo taken 7th October.

Two growers tried it in 2009, one had much better results than the other, one was being grown as a concentrate source in preference to Spring Wheat, the other as a cash crop. The concentrate crop was to be crimped and clamped, whilst the other was to be dried and sold at 15%MC.

One of the risks of combining maize is being able to harvest the crop early enough before the onset of the wet weather in November. Both growers crops were ready to combine in October, however for various reasons this didn't happen. Sure enough on Saturday the 7th of November the first winter storm blew in, deluging 3 inches of rain with 45mph winds in 4 hours between 6 and 10pm that night, with the results seen below.

Photo's below taken 9th November.

Even after this setback with the weather, the concentrate crop still averaged over 4.5t/ac, even though 4 ac were lost and not cut. It was telling that the crop was actually too dry when it was being crimped as water had to be added to aid the crimping process. However, the result worked in the farmers favour with 330 tonnes being crimped at a cost of £70/ton in the clamp, still a lot cheaper than bought in wheat and a far better feed. The actual advantage has turned the enterprise around with grian maize now being grown instead of forage maize as the one thing it does provide is a very stable diet platform for the cows.

Maize Trial Pt 2

Fresh weight yields for the varieties was as follows;

Acclaim 14.8t/ac
LG 3181 17.8t/ac
Lorado 18.4t/ac
LG3193 18.9t/ac
Beethoven 22.3t/ac
Nescio 22.7t/ac
Award 19. 2t/ac

Starch yields were a bit more interesting as can be seen from some of the cob photo's below and didn't follow the pattern of yield above in some instances.




Acclaim (4 rows in middle above) being the earliest to maturity had the highest dry matter (36%), but lowest ratio of starch to fresh weight, even though the plants were much shorter than the rest by a good 12 to 30 inches. Award had the lowest dry matter and was only at 22% DM when harvested.

Acclaim on left, LG3181 middle.


Whole cob weight (sheaves removed) averages as follows:
Acclaim 210 grams
LG 3181 270 grams
Lorado 270 grams
LG3193 236 grams
Beethoven 258 grams
Nescio 268 grams
Award 220 grams

What is interesting to note is that Beethoven and Nescio both combined very high yields in tonnage terms with a good average cob weight and when analysed gave readings of 32 %DM/34% Starch and 29%DM and 33% Starch respectively.


Beethoven left, Lorado right of knife.

LG3181 and Lorado both surprised with quick dry down, large cobs and high starch contents, facts which have been born out by similar merchant trials at Tregony where LG3181 had the highest starch return/ac of all varieties on trial and Lorado the highest return at a big trial at Launceston. This is also consistent with national trials for grain maize where both these varieties have come top for grain yield vs DM, both yielding over 8.4 ton/ha at 15 % moisture content.

Lorado and LG3181 were also both grown in a trial a mile down the road with Kingdom and both outyielded it by some margin, with Lorado doing the best of the three. This variety wiill be covered more in the section on grain maize where it performed well, even though the weather did wreak havoc.

Maize Trial at Bude. Part 1

There has been a fair amount of data and results published in the press with regards to maize varieties, some funded by merchants, others by seed houses, some done by farmers and those done by NIAB. The new NIAB descriptive list has been published and it is good to see the LG varieties are performing well across a broad spectrum of sites, although hopefully this year we are going to see a proper Less Favourable Site being added to the South West, rather than the data from Bicton, which should be classified more as a favourable site.

This year I conducted a small scale trial near Bude with the idea to get some relevant data for this area, given that the climatic factors and soils are very different here than those at Bicton.

The following varieties were planted at 45,000 seeds/ac on the 5th of May, 12 days after the grain maize planted in the same area. Nescio, Award, Beethoven, Lorado, LG 3193, LG 3181 and

Acclaim to give a spread of maturity classes from 4 to 10. The site was westerly facing, about 150 ft above sealevel, fairly exposed to wind, on ground that had been contiuous cereals before going into maize, this being year 5 into maize, so not an ideal situation, but typical of a lot of maize ground in the area. The site was dunged with FYM @ 10 ton/ac, also had 100 units of Nitrogen supposedly applied in the form of biogas digestate, as well as 50kgs DAP down the spout at planting. The plots were the full eight rows of the planter, each line being just over 300 meters long to give some idea of variations in line and soil type as there were a few clay patches in the field and also to try and get a representative yield analysis.

Initial germination was good, plants grew away well before slowing down with the cooler drier conditions in late May. The initial herbicide application pre-emergent worked well, although the was a post emergent flush of volunteer oats and oil seed rape that required spraying. This checked the growth rate and at first this was assumed to be the main cause of slow growth.

By the 26th of June, the difference in growth rates between 3 different sites all within a couple of miles of each other was starting to generate some cause for concern. A line was developing half way through the trial site below which plants were paler and shorter, whilst above this line plants were much greener and healthier looking. This was the cut off line where chicken manure had been spread previously at 2 ton/ac.

Come 14th of July, yellow patches were readily apparent in the area where no chicken manure had been previously applied, plants were just not growing as vigourously as they should have been, so after an inspection involving the suppliers of the biogas, a soil nitrogen test revealed a huge difference in available nitrogen between the two halves of the field. As a result the field, and those others that had biogass applied to them were topdressed with 75kg/ac of AN, with an immediate improvement in growth and colour, with very minimal scorching of leaf area.

The above photo shows Acclaim tassling, it was about a week ahead of the medium varieties, as would be expected with it being a class 10, with LG 3181, Lorado, Beethoven and LG3193 following shortly behind with Nescio and Award last.