Group 3 soft wheat Merit enjoys renewed interest from growers
12th September 2022
Resurgence of interest in the Group 3 soft wheat variety Merit comes as no surprise to one Lincolnshire grower.
Tim Booth of JM Booth and Sons manages a total arable of 404ha in Swineshead near Boston, Lincolnshire. Half of his cropping area is made up of Group 3 winter wheat, which he has been growing for several years now. He believes Group 3 varieties offer growers more flexibility on end markets and potentially make it easier to achieve the right milling specification.
Mr Booth explains: “As a business we tend to concentrate on feed wheats, staying away from milling wheats and the complexities of meeting full milling specifications. However, I do grow Group 3 varieties if they yield consistently and are easy to manage.
“Merit, from breeder Elsoms Seeds, certainly ticks those key boxes and it’s the third time we’ve grown it, drilling 34.7ha on 13th October last year into a high grade 2 silt as a good first wheat entry following a crop of peas.”
Released in 2021, Merit (Britannia x Cougar) is a Group 3 soft wheat variety recommended for sowing in the East. It offers great disease resistance to brown rust and yellow rust, the latter often being a major issue for Eastern growers. The variety is also resistant to the fungi Septoria tritici and the orange blossom midge.
Tim Booth combining his crop of Merit on 31st July.
Merit winter wheat has shown promising yields at this year’s AHDB trials that were comparable to those of leading Group 4 feed wheats. The fact that the variety presents farmers with multiple end market options, such as biscuit and cake-making, distilling and export, further contributes to its popularity.
According to Mr Booth, Merit has established very well throughout early autumn. It also competed well against his farm’s main weed burden of blackgrass and pushed on nicely into the spring following a mild winter. Mr Booth then applied 250kg/ha of nitrogen to the crop across 2 splits in early March and early April respectively.
“Merit had no T0, and we went with a fairly standard fungicide program of Fluxapyroxad + Pyraclostrobin for Septoria and rust control at T1, along with a PGR of 0.75L/ha of Chlormequat. At T2 we applied Fenpicoxamid at 1.2L/ha – again for Septoria control and followed up with 0.4L/ha of Prothioconazole as an ear spray at T3,” he added.
Despite yellow rust pressure in the area this year, Merit has remained very clean across Mr Booth’s farm due to its strong resistance to the disease. Following harvest on 31st July, an average yield of 10.7t/ha at 13.6% moisture was recorded, surpassing the two previous yields achieved for the variety.
Mr Booth continued: “The specific weight was an excellent 80kg/hl with a Hagberg falling number of 258 and Merit produced a nice bold grain with the overall quality in the shed looking extremely good. The milling specification for a Group 3 is 10.5-11% protein, so our achieved protein content of 11.5% for the crop was ahead of the curve.
“For anyone looking for a consistently high yielding feed wheat, as well as an easy to grow and easy to manage Group 3 with the wider market opportunities out there in the distilling, export and biscuit sectors then Merit should make their decision an easy one,” he concluded.
