| Grain
Gleam winter wheat (from Syngenta)
Syngenta gets five high-
yielding cereal varieties
added to Recommended
Lists
High yield coupled with agronomic characteristics that
are set to make them practical to grow. These are core
benefits shared by all five of the new Syngenta winter
cereal varieties being added to the AHDB Recommended
Lists for 2018, says the breeder’s seed manager,
Samantha Brooke.
ew Gleam winter
feed wheat
“The first thing you
notice about our
new hard Group 4
winter feed wheat,
Gleam, is that it is very high-
yielding. But importantly, it has
also delivered its yield consistently
across different seasons, in
different regions, and in first and
second cereal positions,” says Mrs
Brooke. “Stable yields are useful
with volatile grain prices.
“What’s also significant is that
Gleam can be drilled over a wide
window, from about the middle of
September onwards.
“In our trials, Gleam shows it
produces a lot of tillers and it has
held on to those tillers well. So its
yield comes from producing a
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good number of smaller ears,
rather than a few, heavy ones. But
its ears contain good-sized grains
with a good specific weight.”
Also from a practical viewpoint,
Mrs Brooke says Gleam is early-
maturing and has very good straw
strength, and arrives with good
resistance to Septoria tritici and
yellow rust, plus orange wheat
blossom midge resistance. It
continues Syngenta’s expansion
into winter wheat, following recent
introductions of Shabras and
Graham, she notes.
New hybrid feed barleys
Adding to Syngenta’s high-
yielding hybrid winter feed barleys
on the AHDB Recommended List,
new hybrids Hyvido Belmont and
Hyvido Libra are set to occupy
slightly different market positions
Hyvido Belmont hybrid winter barley (from Syngenta)
Hyvido Libra hybrid winter barley (from Syngenta)
to each other, Samantha Brooke
believes.
“Hyvido Belmont is a bit like the
current hybrid, Hyvido Bazooka, in
that it offers growers outstandingly
high yield,” says Mrs Brooke.
“It also has no major
weaknesses to the more difficult
barley diseases, and it has
produced a good specific weight.
But for farms where an even
higher specific weight is important,
then Hyvido Libra could be more
appropriate.
“Libra is slightly lower-yielding
than Belmont but is the best
quality hybrid barley, in terms of
specific weight, that we’ve ever
bred.”
New winter malting barleys
The two new high-yielding
winter malting varieties, Electrum
and Coref, being added to the
2018 AHDB Recommended List
continue Syngenta’s heritage in
malting barley breeding, says
Samantha Brooke. Both are also
early-maturing, she notes.
“Of the two, Electrum is likely to
come to the market sooner than
Coref because there will be more
Electrum seed available,” explains
Mrs Brooke.
“A year or two down the line,
Electrum could be a good partner
in the marketplace alongside Craft,
which is also an up-and-coming
variety, because end users like to
have more than one variety to
choose from, in order to spread
risk.”
December 2017 | Farming Monthly | 17