Five new varieties have been added to the BBRO/NIAB Recommended List of Sugar Beet Varieties for 2011. All new additions have rhizomania tolerance, with two also having tolerance to beet cyst nematode (BCN).

From KWS comes Rosalinda KWS with a very high yield potential and Annouschka KWS which incorporates BCN tolerance. Valeska, from Nickerson Sugar Beet Seed Ltd, also shows a very high yield potential. Elsoms’ SESVANDEHAVE-bred Cheetah couples high yields with relatively high sugar content levels.

Two years of trials with Syngenta’s new SDHI fungicide Bontima feature in our latest New product Guide, along with detailed product information and TAG’s view on if and where it should be used.

After a long wait for soil temperatures to reach a level where weed control can resume, they show no signs yet of reaching double figures and crop and weed growth is still slow. Some areas reached 8-9^oC before Easter but in some parts they have slipped back to 6^oC.

With many oilseed rape crops defoliated by pigeons and cold weather, growth regulation for canopy management is less of an issue now, but growers with healthy, bulky crops may still need to make decisions on whether to make the investment, before the crop passes the yellow bud stage.

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Ensuring a load of barley is the correct variety will be faster and easier with the launch of a new interactive web-based identification program.

‘Barley-id’ has been developed by NIAB and is available as a subscription service to anyone involved in the transport, trading, marketing and processing of barley where varietal identity is essential. It will also be used as a training tool in NIAB’s grain ID workshops and courses.

Low soil temperatures are keeping weeds ‘closed for winter’, a condition in which they could shrug off any herbicides applied to them. Both grass and broad leaved weeds need to be actively growing for most herbicides to be effective on them, and the prolonged cold weather is increasing the backlog of field work facing arable farmers.

Turning plants into food to eat, beer to drink and even fuel for our cars is the focus of an interactive demonstration at the Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday 13th March.

“Our ‘Crops for Food-Crops for Fuel’ exhibition will show how all the crops in fields surrounding Cambridge and across East Anglia are turned into bread, sugar, beer, cooking oil and biodiesel,” explains Dr Lydia Smith from Cambridge-based plant research organisation NIAB.

Spring Strategies 2, outlining TAG’s advice for disease control in combinable crops for the 2010 campaign, has now been posted to Members and can also be downloaded from this site.

With March arriving many growers are faced with the prospect of late sown spring crops and a bottleneck of fertiliser applications as further snow and rain keeps soils wet. TAG’s spring Field Days have now started and these and other issues will be popular topics for discussion between Members and TAG staff.