Awards set to commend hyper yielding crops
Growers from around the country who chose to take part in the GRDC’s inaugural hyper yielding crops (HYC) awards initiative are about to find out just how hyper their crops really faired against fellow competitors.
Five seminars are planned to take place in June where winners of the GRDC’s HYC inaugural awards will be announced. There will be two awards per region – overall highest wheat yield and highest wheat yield based on % of yield potential.
To enable a ‘community’ approach to the HYC concept, the HYC awards program was established in 2020, the aim of which was to enable growers to benchmark the agronomic performance of their crops compared to a regional standard. Over 50 crops were entered into the 2020 wheat HYC awards spanning from the Albany Port zone through to Tasmania.
Jon Midwood of TechCrop is the HYC national extension coordinator. Mr Midwood along with each region’s project officer will present the awards and provide growers and advisers with a report interpretation including the potential yield calculations for each region. There will also be a chance for open discussion on lessons learnt in 2020.
Nick Poole, FAR Australia’s managing director and HYC project lead will co-present with research director Dr Kenton Porker and HYC field research officers on findings from the 2020 research trials. Mr Poole said “we are extremely excited to hear of the HYC’s inaugural award winners and the agronomic practices they adopted to reach these goals. Our year one trial results will not only focus on the yields achieved, but will also touch on climate statistics and what these meant for each crop, what management strategies worked best for disease management, the impact of artificial N and the interaction between genotype, environment and management (GEM) and how these interactions affected the phenology, biomass, final grain yields and overall profit margins. We hope that we can learn from these findings and as a result build on our yield potentials and margins in the years to come.”
Details of events:
Hadspen, Tasmania – Tuesday 8th June: https://faraustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/210608_TAS_HYC-RESULTS-AND-AWARDS-FINAL.pdf
Rutherglen, NSW/NE VIC – Tuesday 8th June: https://faraustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/210608_NSW_HYC-RESULTS-AND-AWARDS-FINAL-1.pdf
Green Range, WA – Thursday 10th June: https://faraustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/210610_WA_HYC-RESULTS-AND-AWARDS-FINAL.pdf
Skipton, VIC – Wednesday 16th June: https://faraustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/210616_VIC_HYC-RESULTS-AND-AWARDS-FINAL.pdf
Millicent, SA – Thursday 17th June: https://faraustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/210617_SA_HYC-RESULTS-AND-AWARDS-FINAL-1.pdf
The HYC awards will remain focused on wheat for 2021 and the project team is developing a plan whereby growers and advisers from outside the current regions can enter crops into the GRDC HYC awards programme. It is hoped that by expanding the HYC awards it will generate greater interest and collaboration in the quest for higher yields.
The GRDC’s Hyper Yielding Crops (HYC) initiative, led by FAR Australia, is a four-year investment spanning five states (Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, New South Wales and Western Australia) which aims to push the economically attainable yield boundaries of wheat, barley and canola.
The HYC initiative involves five research centres of excellence, and attached to each of these are five focus farm paddock trials and an innovative grower network charged with taking research and development learnings from small plot to paddock scale. For the second year, growers are being invited to join these networks and host paddock-scale trials on their properties to enable a “seeing is believing” participatory approach to the research.
The HYC Focus Farm paddock strips, innovative grower network and awards involve Techcrop working with the Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) at Federation University Australia and four farming groups across the HRZ these are Southern Farming Systems (SFS) in Tasmania and Victoria, MacKillop Farm Management Group (MFMG) in SA, Riverine Plains Inc in NSW, and Stirlings to Coast Farmers in WA. Growers, advisers and others wishing to become involved in the HYC initiative can contact their respective state project officers:
- Victoria – Ashley Amourgis of SFS, aamourgis@sfs.org.au
- Tasmania – Naomi Hender of SFS, nhender@sfs.org.au
- SA – Jen Lillecrapp of MFMG, jen@brackenlea.com
- NSW – Kate Coffey of Riverine Plains Inc – kate@riverineplains.org.au
- WA – Nathan Dovey of Stirling to Coast Farmers, ceo@scfarmers.org.au
For further information on the Hyper Yielding Crops project, please visit https://faraustralia.com.au/hyper-yielding-crops/
A full list of events can be viewed at https://faraustralia.com.au/event/
For a full set of provisional Hyper Yielding Crops 2020 trials results, please visit https://faraustralia.com.au/resource/