Gongs for best field days site

And the team effort paid off as PGW Wrightson bagged the Hamish Reid Memorial Award for best overall site and best large site at the event.

PGW Seeds in conjunction with PGW Rural Supplies takes the same site at Kirwee for each of the biennial events and populates it with display plots of its various lines of pasture, forage and cropping varieties.

Stu Hunter, Lincolnbased extension agronomist for PGG Wrightson Seeds, says planning the site began around August or September, with the plots cultivated and sown by the end of December.

“It was over six months ago the team started thinking about this and planning for this day. It’s quite satisfying to see it all come together.”

It has needed watering and care over the summer.

“Especially with our multi-graze options like your ryegrasses, the chicory that we have over the back corner there, and even the multi-graze brassica species, we’re needing to time the cuts so that we can have enough forage suitable for the display.

“The grasses would have been cut three to four times.”

Several new grasses on display this year included a perennial called Accrue.

“This is our new diploid and it has a late-flowering date so this will flower 22 days later than the original Nui ryegrass,” said Hunter.

“This gives you quality for longer into the season, before it starts to elongate and produce seed heads, so it’s a really good tool on farm if you want to hold that quality later into the season and not be fighting with seed head early on around mid to late October.”

Also new to the site this year was Midway, a mid-flowering perennial ryegrass to give options for those who need an earlier flush of feed.

An example might be a sheep farmer needing high quality feed early in the season to support lactation for ewes with lambs at foot, said Hunter.

On a dairy farm it may depend on when they see a deficit.

“If they’re looking to boost autumn production, generally the later flowering ryegrasses have higher autumn dry matter production. So that would be when we’d use a late.

“Sometimes farms will have a couple of heading dates so that they get a flush at the right times of the year so that you’re not dealing with the whole farm flowering at one time and losing quality.”

Another product on display was Palliser, a new long rotation tetraploid hybrid.

“What this allows us to get is shoulder season growth over what the perennials would have.”

With a high percentage of perennial in its breeding compared to the short rotation hybrids, Hunter explained that Palliser has improved longevity, potentially “pushing the boat out” to four to five years before needing to renew the pasture.

Also on display was Pallaton Raphno forage crop, a cross between radish and kale which Hunter says provides really good grazing traits including drought and insect tolerance and a multi-grazing capability that could give as many as six grazings a year depending on management and conditions.

The display also put a lot of emphasis on PGG Wrightson Seeds’ “Programmed Approach” to pasture renewal, in which staff would sit down educating the merchant reps so they can have the discussion with their customer to plan out pasture renewal in a way that takes into account why a pasture may be in need of replacement and maps out a programme going forward to give a good result not just at the end of the approach but throughout the renovation phase.