Lincolnshire farmer David Hoyles said he is very pleased with his late-September drilled seed crop of biscuit wheat, after it yielded nearly two tonnes more than the farm’s five-year average.
Mr Hoyles, of GH Hoyles in Long Sutton, harvested two fields of the Limagrain LG Astronomer biscuit wheat crop on July 27 and 28. The two fields were drilled in late September, following a minimum tillage approach and vining pea crops.
This year, the biscuit wheat fields yielded between 13.2 and 13.4 tonnes per hectare, and achieved a moisture content of between 13.3 and 13.6%.
The farm’s five-year average yield is 11.6 t/ha – though Mr Hoyles did add that this included two lower yielding seasons “where we had very wet autumns and lower levels of radiation in the spring.”
Below, Mr Hoyles describes his biscuit wheat crop’s season.
“We had very little disease at the beginning of the season, so skipped the T0. It was wet in April so the T1 was more robust, containing Revystar (47.5 g/l fluxapyroxad and 100 g/l mefentrifluconazole), Arizona (folpet) and a good dose of PGR.”
However, it was dry again by T2 he points out, so only Firefly (10 g/l prothioconazole and 45 g/l fluoxastrobin) and boron were applied.
“An earlier than normal T3 at the end of May (T3’s usually go on in the second week of June), consisted of Uinvoq (50g/L fenpicoxamid &100 g/l prothioconazole) & boron.”
“We didn’t have any issues with Septoria, which we know was a concern with some of the Group 3’s last year. As Astronomer is tall, we ensured the PGR programme was robust, and consequently had no problems with lodging.”
“We were disappointed that we didn’t have as much soil N after the vining peas as we had hoped for, which meant the crop received a total of 160kg N/ha which was applied in the seedbed, and three follow up applications.”
