Thirteen new first choice varieties have been added to the 2013 Forage Maize Descriptive List launched by BSPB and NIAB at the Livestock 2012 Event.

Varieties include Activate, Ambitions, Arcade and Yukon all from Lima Grain;Froft and Kromwell  from Huntseeds; Ascender and Konsensus from KWS; RAGT’s Twixxi snd Chavoxx; Surexxo from Saaten Union and Grainseed’s Dualton and Marco.

All thirteen varieties feature on the Favourable DL, with twelve also added to the Less Favourable DL aimed at marginal growing conditions.

Using the descriptive list has been emphasised by forage crop specialist Dr Gareth Burns following difficult growing conditions over the past year.

“The particularly cold and wet weather in April either slowed or damaged establishment, and in many cases, delayed sowing until May. This will delay harvest by two or three weeks and yields will likely be down on previous years,” he said.

Lima Grains’ Activate has the highest starch yield of 6.41t/ha and one of the highest cell wall digestibilities at 58.5%. Combined, this means Activate is the highest scoring variety for Metabolisable Energy content, coming out at 11.9 MJ/Kg DM.

Ambition has the highest ME yield per hectare of all the early varieties on the Less Favourable List. This achieved a 203,770 MJ/Kg DM with DM yielding 17.8t/ha and starch quality of 6.11t/ha.

Yukon is also high in starch, yielding 5.97t/ha with a DM yield of 17.1%. It is also earlier maturing that Ambition and yielded 12.28t/ha in the NIAB/MGA 2011 trial.

Tim Richmond from Lima Grain said; “Energy yields are significant when selecting a maize variety. It takes 5.3MJ of ME to produce one litre of milk so Ambitions extra ME yield of 12.581 MJ/ha compared to the control means it can support an extra 2.374 litres of milk. That’s worth around an extra £600/ha to growers.”

Dualto and Chavoxx display particularly high CWD, with a 3% and 2.5% improvement over controls for favourable sites. For less favourable locations Twixxi shows the highest CWD score of 59.2%, 3% higher than the control varieties, followed by Chaboxx (57.0%).

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