Blackstone suitability for areas with sterility risks now also supported by new Agrii Aberdeenshire trial data

Haddington based farmer James Kennedys’ first time experience with Group 4 soft wheat Blackstone produced great results this year, despite some horrendous late autumn and winter weather, and he now plans to grow it commercially with an eye on a premium for the distilling market.

James says” As a business we’ve only ever grown Group 2’s and 3’s. So, when we accepted the offer to grow Blackstone from seed merchant Dods of Haddington last year, we knew we were stepping into uncharted territory.

“Drilling 17ha on the 15^th of October at a variable seed rate of 400 seeds M² weather and soil conditions were initially pretty good. However, just a couple of days after applying the pre-em herbicide, the heavens opened, and we did seriously begin to wonder if someone had left a tap running in the sky. Despite enduring horrendous rain and coming through the winter and early spring unscathed, by February the Blackstone crop was still at least 2 weeks behind and we were desperate to get onto the heavy fields and get some nutrition into the crop.

“3 splits of nitrogen totalling 169kg/ha were eventually applied on February 29^th, March 12^th and April 20^th, and, with the wet weather finally beginning to abate, the crop began to catch up on its growth stages as we began our 3.5 spray fungicide program in April.

“Septoria can be very challenging in eastern Scotland, so we always try to stay fairly robust on spray programs using our main go-to fungicide Inatreq + prothioconazole as our main flag leaf spray. Thankfully, it wasn’t a high pressure Septoria season, and Blackstone was still showing 3 clean leaves by the time we’d applied our T3 in late June.

“Cutting on August 30^th, Blackstone yielded 11.66t/ha at 15% moisture, 1t/ha above our 5 year farm average. In view of the extreme weather, plus the fact that it was our first time with a Group 4, we were blown away with the final yield results. We’re a mixed farm, so straw yield is also very important, and the variety certainly didn’t disappoint here either producing 4.2t/ha of tall, stiff straw.

“Blackstone is a taller variety than we’d normally grow but, despite this, we had no lodging or flattening issues and it stood very well, showing good resilience during a testing season. Post-harvest grain samples confirmed a specific weight of 81.8kg/hl, a Hagberg falling number of 350 and a protein content of 9.4%. Although I’d have liked to have seen a protein percentage closer to 10, its been a tough year across the board on protein so I’m not going to judge it too harshly there” concludes James. 

John Miles, Seed Technical Manager for Agrii, is also very positive about the variety’s future and sees Blackstone’s long, flexible drilling window and 2 year performance in Agrii’s Scottish based sterility trials as major positives for many northern and Scottish growers.

He adds” Enabling Scottish growers to make better informed variety decisions, we’ve been running our sterility trials in Aberdeenshire since 2018 now. To be deemed suitable for the Scottish market we generally look for a sterility score of less than 10%, with scores closer to 5% identifying varieties as being highly suitable for many of the growing conditions farmers face north of the border.

Looking at our data set for the last 2 years, Blackstone, from Independent breeder Elsoms Seeds, recorded 6.2% in 2023 and 4.8% in 2024 giving it a mean average of 5.5% across the last 2 years. That puts Blackstone in the top 2 or 3 best performing varieties on sterility, making it highly suitable for all areas which have potential sterility risks. Add that data to it’s very wide sowing window and you have a winter wheat that many Scottish growers should be taking a keen interest in” he confirms.