The latest edition of the Victorian Crop Sowing Guide is now available for growers to help inform variety choices for the 2021 cropping season.
The guide provides information on the most common grown crop varieties grown in Victoria, including variety performance and disease ratings, at a time when growers are starting to think about next year’s sowing options.
The guide includes newly released varieties available for growers in 2021, and is sure to be a valuable resource when choosing varieties to best suit growers needs for the 2021 season. When selecting a variety, growers need to make their selection based on available variety performance information, pest and disease resistance, individual farm and paddock situations, access and availability of target markets, and storage and handling facilities; and are encouraged to use the Sowing Guide as a talking point with their agronomists, consultants and marketing agents.
The publication is a valued resource for growers and consultants, containing the latest grain yield and quality data on the major winter crops grown in Victoria from the National Variety Trials (NVT) program. It contains the latest available data and ratings on newly released varieties in Victoria, as well as outlines agronomic characteristics to help growers make decisions on what varieties to select for their crop rotation program.
The 2021 Victorian Crop Sowing Guide features new information generated from the GRDC’s National Phenology Initiative (NPI). The NPI has undertaken variety experiments across Australia to determine development patterns of different varieties in different environments, and this information has been used to construct the time of sowing tables for cereals in the guide. The NPI also used simulated optimal flowering periods in different environments from previous GRDC investments.
The Victorian Crop Sowing Guide is published in partnership with the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and Agriculture Victoria.
National Variety Trials (NVT)
The NVTs provide independent information on varieties for growers, and the results create a ranking of new and commonly grown varieties in terms of potential grain yield to allow growers to make informed variety selections based on the information available. The data presented in the guide uses the NVTs Long Term Multi Environment Trial (MET) data and uses a five-year rolling dataset to allow growers to compare the performance of each variety over a long term period.
NVT Harvest Reports
The NVT Harvest Reports are an important complement to the Victorian Crop Sowing Guide, which will include the most recent NVT yield data results from the 2020 season soon after its release. There are 16 harvest reports from regions around Australia; the information is presented at a local site level to support grower and adviser decision making in their local region, in contrast to the state-wide results included in the Crop Sowing Guide. Results from the 2020 trials will be released in the harvest reports in late February 2021.
Further Information
The Victorian Crop Sowing Guide is available online on the GRDC website. To receive a printed copy of the Sowing guide in the mail each year upon release subscribe to GRDC GroundCover.
The latest 2020 NVT data will be available in early 2021 at the NVT Online website.
The 2020 NVT Harvest reports will be available online in February 2021.
Acknowledgements
Rob Wheeler, GRDC NVT Regional Manager
