A LEADING seed company is hoping that one of its latest star varieties will blow the opposition away with its 'resilience'.

Limagrain UK's LG Typhoon is a high yielding Group 4 hard wheat that joined the AHDB Recommended List for 2022-2023 and is set to be available to UK growers this autumn.

It is claimed to offer the package that growers 'have been asking for in a hard wheat' – it's high yielding, consistent and resilient, with a solid all-round disease package and OWBM resistance.

“LG Typhoon delivers an exceptional consistency of performance across very different seasons and regions of the UK, yielding 102% – a great attribute to have in any variety,” commented Ron Granger, Limagrain UK’s arable technical manager.

He acknowledged, though, that whilst yield was important to many growers, some fundamentally like to grow robust varieties that deliver time and again across differing seasons and rotations.

This consistency of performance across locations, seasons and rotations is down to the variety’s excellent all-round foliar disease resistance and agronomic characteristics, he pointed out.

“It has a very good untreated yield (89%) – an important attribute, even in the hard feed sector, that was traditionally a high input, high output scenario, and is a valuable tool regarding fungicide programmes and timings.

"Its resistance rating of 7.2 [three-year data set] for septoria, comes from a combination of genetic sources different to those in the majority of current RL varieties and is a significant factor in protecting this resistance rating going forward.

“It also has an excellent yellow rust resistance of 9, combined with YR seedling resistance which is a valuable insurance around the earlier spray windows of T0 and T1, where yellow rust can be the main focus in regional high pressure situations,” said Mr Granger.

But, he was keen to point out that as both yellow rust and septoria strains are continuously evolving, all crops should be closely monitored and treated appropriately – a lesson learnt from the 2021 season. It also has the valuable bonus of orange wheat blossom midge (OWBM) resistance, in addition to a (6) for eyespot and fusarium.

Mr Granger said that a lot of second wheats could be drilled this autumn to make the best of high wheat prices and highlighted LG Typhoon’s excellent performance as a second – yielding 104% of control.

“Its stiff straw and good lodging resistance is in line with other feed wheats, such as Gleam. It is a high-tillering variety that performs well at lower seed rates and can be drilled from mid-September to mid-February – however, it exhibits a genuine suitability for the earlier sowing situation, yielding 105%, which is well over the performance of popular hard wheats, Graham and Gleam, in this sowing period,” he pointed out.

LG Typhoon is slightly later to mature (+2), but he did not see that as an issue. “As we learnt with our later variety, Revelation (+3), it was important to have a range of maturities across the farm to spread harvest risk in catchy seasons,” he added. “In terms of grain quality, LG Typhoon has a good specific weight (76.3 kg/hl), similar to that of Gleam."

How it fits a regenerative system?

There is still much uncertainty about what varieties best suit a ‘regen’ farming system, pointed out Mr Granger.

“However, we know that wheats in a regen system tend to be direct drilled, and in some circumstances early, which means they need to sit back, and not race off too fast in the autumn or early spring, which has implications regarding agronomy inputs and programmes.

“In our trials last year, where we compared the behaviour of a range of varieties when drilled in this situation, we found LG Typhoon did just this, sitting prostrate with a slower plant growth through the winter into the spring.

“It is very high tillering and this, combined with the fact that it filled the wider rows with a very high head count, made it a stand out variety in this situation.”

Its disease profile, along with OWBM resistance, allows for some flexibility with inputs - which again suits a regen system, he noted. “Taking all of the characteristics of the variety into consideration, there’s no doubt that LG Typhoon would appear well suited to the regen approach,” he argued.