Harvesting of the extensive winter crop variety trials conducted through the Grains Research and Development Corporation’s National Variety Trials (NVT) program is now complete and data from those trials is being made available to Australia’s growers and their advisers.
GRDC’s NVT acting senior manager Rob Wheeler said single site results from successful trials in 2018 had been finalised and this data had been fed into multi-year, multi-environment trial (MET) variety performance analysis.
‘‘These multi-year, rolling datasets for all crops and growing regions will provide growers with the most valuable information to support their decision-making around what to sow this year,’’ Mr Wheeler said.
‘‘Long-term MET results are the most accurate and reliable means of interpreting variety performance across sites and years.’’
Mr Wheeler said it was important that growers factored long-term analysis of trials into their variety selection considerations, rather than results from a single year.
‘‘This is especially important after a year such as 2018 where — in many regions — the season was far from normal.’’
Similar to the experiences of many growers, some NVT trials were impacted by drought, frost, wind and other climatic events.
Growers and advisers are encouraged to base their variety decisions on not just yield results but also market receival quality data.
‘‘Simply focusing on yield does not provide growers with a reliable indication of which varieties may potentially offer the best returns — the quality of the grain harvested is also an important factor,’’ Mr Wheeler said.
Planning for the NVT program for 2019 is well under way, with the number of trials expected to be more than 600.
Mr Wheeler said NVT represented a huge logistical undertaking given it evaluated varieties for the 10 major crop types — wheat, barley, canola, chickpea, faba bean, field pea, lentil, lupin, oat and sorghum — within hundreds of trials across the country.
Trial results and analysis can be viewed at: www.nvtonline.com.au and instructional videos on how to interpret NVT data can be viewed at: bit.ly/2W75A5U
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