As harvest progresses Gordon Rennie provides an update on the crops.

The middle of August saw winter wheat being harvested in good conditions, though with very mixed results. However showers has created a stop-start harvest towards the end of the month.

Given that most growers would hope to harvest 10t/ha, it’s ‘a real scunner’ to have fields averaging under 7t/ha. A combination of sodden fields, undetected Take-All disease, Septoria, and a lack of sunshine has caused winter wheat to struggle significantly.

Yields look back on the yearYields look back on the year

However, winter oats have fared much better, with reports of a few 10t crops. Unlike wheat, oats are not susceptible to Take-All. In wheat, apart from Take-All, Septoria is the biggest yield robber. Given that the variety Skyscraper has very poor genetic resistance, it has taken a real hammering.

The varieties Champion and LG Typhoon have performed much better, and the new contender, Bamford, looked fantastic in the NIAB trials near Berwick. For a low-input, high-yielding wheat, Champion may well be the Wonder Horse. Typhoon is best suited to early drilling, while Bamford is looking very promising for soft wheat distilling—if you can still get any seed. With some Scottish whisky distillers and others importing shiploads of non-assured wheat from Eastern Europe, the November wheat price has fallen by around £50/t, from £230/t to £180/t. Are we back to £180/t being the norm? If so, one would need to be selling at least 10t/ha to make the sums add up.

I recently witnessed a cracking crop of Golden Promise spring barley being harvested by my very good neighbours, Marjorie and Lyndsey Ashworth of Abercrombie Farm. My estimate was almost 8 tonnes/ha, with the bonus of a good crop of straw worth £100/t off the field. My father first grew Golden Promise in 1966 at Clifton Mains.

Up until then, we grew a much taller variety called Ymer. Golden Promise is a genetically engineered barley bred by gamma-ray radiation, giving it unique properties of being short, drought-resistant, early-maturing, and high-yielding.

Yields look back on the yearYields look back on the year

Where Ymer could yield 2 tons per acre, Golden Promise produced yields 50% higher, making it a total game-changer. Wouldn’t it be rather wonderful if Golden Promise were once again top of the pops at 58 years old and counting?

I might even raise a glass of a 25-year-old Macallan, made, of course, from Golden Promise barley. If the Scottish Government wants proof that GM works, they should enjoy a dram of The Macallan. It certainly hasn’t damaged Scottish exports.