Using long season wheats for increases in profits and grazing opportunities

Overall Objective

The aim of the project will be to encourage the adoption of long season wheats into crop rotations through farmer scale demonstrations. The project will demonstrate time of sowing, best available varieties suited to the area, and the opportunity for grazing without yield penalty.

The project will also provide practical guidelines or agronomic packages for production of long season wheat in the HRZ of South Western Australia.

Project Synopsis

Growers in the southern region of Western Australia aim to sow their cereal crops in mid-May to maximise yield potential whilst managing frost risk, however later sowing can lead to a reduced yield potential. Early sowing opportunities through summer rainfall events or early breaks in the season often present themselves and producers are not able to take advantage of this opportunity without facing a significant frost risk.

Long season wheats offer a cropping option that can be sown March – Mid April, without excessive frost risk reducing yields and are able utilise the available early moisture and warmer temperatures.

The aim of the project is to assist growers in introducing long-season wheats into their farming systems to best utilise summer rainfall and early-sowing opportunities. The primary objective of this project is to demonstrate to growers the agronomic and enterprise fit and associated benefits of including a long season wheat into their rotation and to encourage the adoption through the farmer scale demonstrations and economic analysis.

Over the two years of the project three demonstration sites were established in the Albany Port Zone and four were established in the South-East Kwinana Port Zone. All demonstrations were replicated allowing the appropriate statistical analysis on each site to be conducted. All trial sites had 3 long season wheat varieties and a control spring wheat variety.

In the Albany port zone Illabo was the highest yielding variety in the 2020 Muradup trial followed by Accroc then Scepter and Nighthawk. Illabo a long season winter wheat was able to match the high yielding spring variety despite the late seeding date of 26^th of May. In 2021 Accroc was the highest yielding variety across both demonstrations. Accroc yielded 8.40 tons/Ha at the Murradup site. Overall the demonstrations at Muradup/West Muradup shows there is a fit for these varieties in the rotation in the high rainfall zones of the Great Southern.

In 2020 at the Corrigin site Catapult was the highest yielding variety followed by Scepter then Denison. In 2020 at the Kurrenkutten site Denison yielded significantly higher than the other three varieties achieving a yield of 2.79 MT/Ha. 2021 was a much better growing season than 2020 with the yields reflecting the better growing season. Denison was the highest yielding variety at 3.32 ton/Ha. Mt Walker in low rainfall zone showed that long season wheats may not really suited to the low rainfall areas even in better seasons.