An 18.0t/ha crop of DSV Champion winter wheat grown by Lincolnshire producer Tim Lamyman has been given a gold award for the highest cereal yield achieved in the 2022 ADAS Yield Enhancement Network (YEN) initiative.
The award-winning crop is currently awaiting world record confirmation and was very much the result of a focused team collaboration, Tim Lamyman says.
"Having looked at the amazing all round disease attributes of DSV Champion in 2020, Robert Lamyman decided we should try it that year. Unfortunately we drilled it way too thinly.
"Despite achieving only 83 plants/m2 at establishment, the crop recovered amazingly and went on to produce up to 20 tillers/plant achieving a yield of 15t/ha at harvest 2021, which was good enough to take second place in YEN for that year.
"We knew the potential was there, especially with the special agronomic programme developed by Frontier and BASF and the Bionature smart nutrition thinking we had used for the crop.
“For 2022 the collaboration decided Champion had the variety specific high yield traits we were looking for to push the UK wheat yields to new boundaries.”
The crop was drilled on the 22nd September at 125kg/ha and on 24th September at 150kg/ha with Vibrance Duo seed dressing, Tim recalls.
"This was still 20% below our standard rate to take account of Champion's fantastic ability to keep tillering. By February 2022 both crops looked on target to achieve the perfect 600 to 650 heads/m2."
A full agronomy programme featuring Chlormequat, Toledo, Modus, Revystar, Mysea, Syrex, Xstress, Calflux, Proline and Azofin Plus, was implemented over the year with particular attention paid to crop nutrition, he expains
"Our aim is to adjust fertiliser strategy to the weather experienced through the winter and how much moisture is in the ground at the time of the first application.
"Due to the last three springs being dryer than average, we have applied three or four even splits of Nitrogen but this changes back to five even splits if we are experiencing a wetter than average spring.
"For 2022's Champion crops we applied 3 x 103.5 Kg/N totalling 310.5kg N/ha of bagged Nitrogen. By applying some Bionature Delta K, to activate the root structures, and TipTop, the total N applied to the crop came to 314kg N/ha.
"The Bionature smart nutrition program was specifically tailored to the Champion as it is such a high tillering and high biomass variety with an almost unique ability to still produce phenomenally long ears (15 cm plus) even at over 600 heads/m2.
In the end it was the higher seed rate crop that produced the highest yield and this also delivered a specific weight of 83.2kg/hectolitre, Tim adds.
"It has been a fantastic experience working within a collaboration team, who have all helped achieve these fantastic yields.
I have to give a special thank you to my hard-working farm - Andy McClung, David Marwood, Sarah, Robert and Emma Lamyman - and also to Ed Smith, from A. W. Smiths and sons for putting up with us running over their weighbridge all the time.
"Our technical team also pushed the sheer yield ability of DSV Champion and we must thank Jeremy Nicolson, Ben Meade, David Robinson and Paul Fogg from Frontier, Andrew Smooker from BASF, Mark Carter and Tom Robinson from Bionature UK and Barnaby Pratchett from GFP."