YEN Ideas lab - great minds discuss ideas
Earlier this year the Yield Enhancement Network (YEN) held an Ideas Lab at Stoneleigh, created to brainstorm how to push production beyond the yield plateau. CPM reports.
OSR has a yield potential of 11-13t/ha.
By Lucy de la Pasture
The concept of the Ideas Lab is to give YEN participants, sponsors and researchers an opportunity to discuss the constraints to yield in the different crops, the scope to manipulate them to enhance crop productivity and come up with practical ideas of how to do this.
Groups of growers can then monitor the effects of suggested treatments using on-farm tramline trials, explains ADAS head of crop performance, Roger Sylvester-Bradley.
He emphasises the purpose of YEN is to identify and help innovators who are producing the highest yields. The next step is to generate enough data so that researchers can dig into the reasons why they’re able to achieve such enhanced performance and then pass on this knowledge through the network.
“The biophysical yield potential of the wheat crop is 20t/ha and the focus of YEN is on bridging the technology gap so growers can get nearer to this potential,” he explains.
The yield relationship in cereal crops revolves around the capture of resources – solar energy and water – and their conversion into grain.
“We have no control over the weather that influences these resources but we can influence their capture, particularly by canopy and soil management. Conversion is much more influenced by genetics in wheat than by management practices, so resource capture is the key area we are interested in,” he explains.
“There’s scope in wheat for improving light capture (by +13%), by increasing the canopy size in early spring and by prolonging canopy survival into Aug. Such crops will also need sufficient roots to capture additional water – about +25mm for each additional week of growth. On an average soil, this means increasing root depth by 15-20cm,” he explains.
For oilseed rape the situation is different. Because yield is sink limited the initial focus must be on maximising the number of seeds set/m2, explains ADAS head of crop physiology, Dr Pete Berry.
“OSR has a yield potential of 11-13t/ha and this is more likely to be limited by water than light in terms of resource capture. But at present, the area where growers can have the biggest influence on yield is through resource conversion to dry matter and partitioning of dry matter into the seed,” he says.
Read more here..
Earlier this year the Yield Enhancement Network (YEN) held an Ideas Lab at Stoneleigh, created to brainstorm how to push production beyond the yield plateau. CPM reports.
OSR has a yield potential of 11-13t/ha.
By Lucy de la Pasture
The concept of the Ideas Lab is to give YEN participants, sponsors and researchers an opportunity to discuss the constraints to yield in the different crops, the scope to manipulate them to enhance crop productivity and come up with practical ideas of how to do this.
Groups of growers can then monitor the effects of suggested treatments using on-farm tramline trials, explains ADAS head of crop performance, Roger Sylvester-Bradley.
He emphasises the purpose of YEN is to identify and help innovators who are producing the highest yields. The next step is to generate enough data so that researchers can dig into the reasons why they’re able to achieve such enhanced performance and then pass on this knowledge through the network.
“The biophysical yield potential of the wheat crop is 20t/ha and the focus of YEN is on bridging the technology gap so growers can get nearer to this potential,” he explains.
The yield relationship in cereal crops revolves around the capture of resources – solar energy and water – and their conversion into grain.
“We have no control over the weather that influences these resources but we can influence their capture, particularly by canopy and soil management. Conversion is much more influenced by genetics in wheat than by management practices, so resource capture is the key area we are interested in,” he explains.
“There’s scope in wheat for improving light capture (by +13%), by increasing the canopy size in early spring and by prolonging canopy survival into Aug. Such crops will also need sufficient roots to capture additional water – about +25mm for each additional week of growth. On an average soil, this means increasing root depth by 15-20cm,” he explains.
For oilseed rape the situation is different. Because yield is sink limited the initial focus must be on maximising the number of seeds set/m2, explains ADAS head of crop physiology, Dr Pete Berry.
“OSR has a yield potential of 11-13t/ha and this is more likely to be limited by water than light in terms of resource capture. But at present, the area where growers can have the biggest influence on yield is through resource conversion to dry matter and partitioning of dry matter into the seed,” he says.
Read more here..