News

Excellent Initial Experience

Grown for the first time last season, HO,LL has certainly impressed Oliver Stennett of Culford Lodge Farms, Ingham near Bury St Edmunds. The 30 ha of Splendor he grew to’ test the water’ in 2006/7 delivered fully 3.7 t/ha on the light land he manages for his father, David against an average of 4.1 t/ha for his conventional double lows.

“We were expecting to see a yield deficit of at least 0.5 t/ha, so we were very pleasantly surprised,” he notes.  “All the more so since it proved trouble-free to grow from our normal mid-late August drilling and we achieved the entire crop met the required  specification. So the bulk of the £30/t fixed premium was a clear bonus.

“Our Splendor is looking equally well this season,” Oliver reports. “It has recovered strongly from the particularly bad pigeon problems we saw over the winter and podded-up very encouragingly. We’re looking forward to a similarly good output plus a current contract premium of £42/t on top of our base price plus oil bonus.

“If it continues to perform as well as it has done so far, we’re planning to put around a third of our 800 ha wheat/rape/wheat/sugarbeet rotation into HO,LL as a block for the future to take full advantage of the opportunity the speciality crop offers.”

Combined with the good volunteer control they achieve through their min till and stale seedbed regime, the Stennett family’s established rotation provides an excellent entry into HO,LL growing.  Even with only a three year break from a previous OSR, they haven’t encountered problems with volunteers – presumably, in part, due to the extra cleaning opportunity offered by the sugarbeet.

As the business provides commercial crop storage for ADM, ensuring identity preservation post-harvest hasn’t been a problem either. Nor has the need to ensure good drill and harvester hygiene.

“We drill the Splendor first anyway, and two hours downtime is all it takes to clean our combine and trailers thoroughly ahead of harvesting,” explains Oliver. “This is no hardship to us. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that should be routine in modern quality crop production. And it’s well worthwhile given the crop’s extra value to us.”