Paul Wilson

Five Acre Farm is spread across two sites with a range of soil types so Paul is always looking for wheat varieties that he knows will cope with rotational and seasonal challenges, and still fill the barn.

With this in mind, his seed merchant Jonathan Payne of Nickerson Seeds advised him to try the soft wheat LG Skyscraper three years ago.

Since then, LG Skyscraper has proven itself season in and season out – delivering both in yields and quality. “This year has been no different, and the variety has given us some really good yields,” says Paul Wilson.

“Even though harvest was four weeks earlier than normal, first wheats after rape and second wheats yielded 11.32 t/ha and 9.2 t/ha respectively. Our fields with third wheats also did very well, yielding 9.2 t/ha.”

“All of the wheat came off at about 13% moisture and a bushel weight of 82-83 kg/hl, so we are very pleased,” says Paul.

“We have issues in some of the heavier wetter fields, so we aim to drill around late October to allow us to spray off as much black-grass before drilling as possible.”

“The LG Skyscraper goes in at a pretty standard seed rate of 190 kg/ha and we find it tillers better than most other varieties, covering the ground pretty quickly.”

“We haven’t had any issues with disease, it’s pretty clean, but we do keep an eye on the length of the straw and make sure that it gets a good PGR programme.”

Inputs are fairly standard at Five Acre Farm. “We would normally use granular nitrogen, but this year taking into account the issues with supply and price, we trialled a liquid nitrogen product, Nutrino, which went on with the fungicides. We found uptake was much better in the dry conditions, and we were able to cut back our nitrogen by about 20%.”

“We have already ordered our LG Skyscraper seed for next year!”