UK farmers and merchants now have a new source of competitive agricultural varieties that challenges the status quo of established suppliers. Elsoms Seeds and Saaten Union have an impressive range of AHDB recommended and candidate cereals and oilseeds varieties, combined with a strong position in the burgeoning energy crop sector, a market leading hybrid cereals development programme, and a growing vining pea business.

 Over recent years, farmers have seen a steady reduction in the number of significant suppliers of new products and varieties to the market. Elsoms have reversed this trend by working with similarly innovative, independent, specialist and technically strong businesses across Europe to build a portfolio of impressive arable varieties that is now attracting strong interest from across the industry.

“The strength of the Elsoms programme is underlined by our wide range of wheat varieties that are available to farmers in 2017” said Adrian Hayler, Head of Elsoms Agricultural Division.  “This currently includes four AHDB candidate wheats, Bennington, Moulton, Freiston and Dunston, early maturing & high yielding AHDB recommended variety Belgrade, specialist alternative milling wheat Lennox as well as hybrid wheats Hybery and Hylux.”

 “The launch of Trinity oilseed rape three years ago heralded the resurgence of our agricultural business,” commented Mark Nightingale, Elsoms Oilseed Rape Breeder. “This year we have built on this success with Elgar, newly recommended by AHDB, which has taken a major share of winter oilseed rape whilst AHDB candidate Skye has made a good start, being marketed exclusively by United Oilseeds”.

The Elsoms portfolio now encompasses oats, barley, spring oats and spring malting barley. AHBD candidate varieties of spring oats and spring malting barley were showcased at Cereals this year and performed well in this year’s official trials. 

“Acorn spring barley demonstrated impressive malting potential combined with excellent disease resistance, whilst Chanson is a new null lox variety that provides growers with a real leap forward in terms of yield,” said Elsoms Seed Sales Specialist, George Goodwin. “Both oat varieties, Harmony and Yukon look promising and have attracted promising interest from merchants.”

The rapid growth of the energy crop sector over the last three years has driven one of the biggest changes in arable cropping since the expansion of the oilseed rape market in in the 1990’s. Elsoms energy crop team of Heather Oldfield and Jonathan Baxendale, in combination with Saaten Union’s Bio Energy Division led by Dr Joachim Moeser, have worked closely with energy companies, merchants, famers, advisors and contractors to help develop the most efficient way of producing crops for energy production. Whilst maize remains the foundation of most energy crop programmes, many farmers are realising the considerable benefits that can be achieved by a sophisticated and integrated rotation that includes hybrid rye, triticale, energy beet and catch and cover crops as well as maize.  

Heather Oldfield, Energy and Forage Crops Manager, Elsoms, commented “Our hybrid rye varieties such as SU Performer and SU Drive continue to take a major share of this growing market and we have developed an exciting maize portfolio to combine with our established triticale varieties to provide farmers with an extensive range of energy crop options.”

Adrian Hayley, Head of the Agricultural Division, Elsoms, added “We have been delighted by the support we have received from across the agricultural sector over the last few years as our arable business has grown and we are proud that we can offer UK farmers a real alternative choice of a wide range of competitive varieties,”.

To find out more about the Elsoms rapidly expanding range of agricultural seed and the success of our varieties in 2016 trials, please visit our enthusiastic crop management teams on stand 138 at CropTec 2016 on 29–30 November at the East of England Showground, Peterborough. 

UK farmers face an increasingly uncertain and volatile global market place, exacerbated by the country’s decision to leave the EU. Factors outside their control, such as commodity prices, weather and politics, are set to have even more influence on the bottom line.

Reducing unit production costs and increasing productivity through technical excellence is becoming even more relevant to remain competitive. With that in mind, this year’s CropTec seminars highlight key areas farmers can influence that directly affect business performance, says CropTec development director Stephen Howe.

“The programme focuses on four areas affecting profitability that are well within growers’ control – crop establishment, crop nutrition, crop protection and crop breeding.

“These seminars, in conjunction with CropTec’s specialist hubs and the wide array of technical exhibits from leading suppliers, provides the ideal catalyst for more detailed discussion to help visitors increase yield, improve efficiency and reduce the all-important unit costs of production.”

Biog:  Conor Colgan farms at Lowick Hall Farm, near Berwick on Tweed. The farm is 700-acres, and the enterprises are an arable rotation of wheat, barley, oilseed rape, oats and beans. He also has an 80-cow suckler beef herd. Six years ago Conor completed an MBA at the Royal Agricultural University; his thesis was on Lean Management, a technique used extensively by efficiency-critical sectors like the car industry. As part of his study, he undertook a complete Lean audit of every process on the farm. He says that this has made him exceptionally judicious about what system changes he makes and whether the introduction of a new practice will improve the value it delivers to his end markets and business bottom-line. “If it doesn’t, I won’t do it.”

Title:  Innovations must be farm-relevant

The innovations that have most benefited my farm all centre on GPS technologies and soil mapping.

I’ve used SOYL to map my fields with the dual aim of generating a more consistent yield from my lower indices fields and adopting a precision approach to applying P to the seedbed and K during the growing season. The net result has been a recovery of soil indices and an improvement in crop yields.

This approach works well for the scale of my operation and because I have a lot of variation in indices. For farms where soils are similar, I suspect that the returns may not be so good.

I feel that the environment for fostering innovation in the arable sector was hit badly when we lost our national advisory service. When ADAS in its old guise went, we lost the prism to assess innovation for our industry.

R&D is now in the hands of the supply chain and its results are used to sell products or kit. There are too few independent trials from the like of AHDB to assess how these new commercial introductions really perform on farm.

So it is beholden on farmers themselves to prove whether a new technology or innovation will actually deliver the purported returns in their own farm situation.

In the future, I think it is really important for organisations like AHDB, TEAGASC and SRUC to analyse the impact of new developments on a range of different farms, soil types and scale of operation. This work would give us the clarity we need to truly compare market introductions, and not take the manufacturer’s word for the projected improvements we’ll gain.

I foresee that investment into genetics and access to GM technologies will become the essential innovation for the coming decades, particularly if issues like Septoria resistance threaten the viability of wheat production in the UK.