The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) in the Republic of Ireland has published its 2017 recommended list of grass and clover varieties.

The list includes 35 perennial ryegrass varieties, nine of which have been bred at AFBI Loughgall in NI.

In the DAFM analysis, ryegrass varieties are ranked on the basis of the pasture profit index, which assigns an economic value in €/ha for each variety against a baseline. The PPI is based on spring, summer and autumn growth, quality, persistency and silage yield.

Heading the PPI in the latest analysis are two varieties bred at Aberystwyth University in Wales, Aberclyde and Abermagic. Top AFBI variety on the list is Fintona (in fourth place), an intermediate tetraploid new to the market in 2017.

In NI, a recommended grass and clover list was published online in 2016, but there are no plans to publish a 2017 list. That comes after the decision in 2015 by the then agriculture minister Michelle O’Neill to close AFBI’s plant-testing station at Crossnacreevy and withdraw funding for the provision of recommended lists.

However, on the eve of the last Stormont election, former agriculture minister Michelle McIlveen announced that Crossnacreevy was to stay open after all to conduct work on new grass and clover varieties.

In a statement at the time, she also outlined her support for retaining recommended list work and welcomed that AFBI was developing proposals on a new grass variety evaluation system in partnership with industry (that would produce a new recommended list). It had been hoped that this might have started in 2018, although without a minister to sign-off on a proposal, that looks increasingly unlikely at present.

See Focus, p58-59