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DLF Seeds and Science is a major player in the global seed industry with plant breeding stations in the UK, Holland, France, Denmark and New Zealand. It has recently entered the Irish market in a joint venture with Seedtech and has established a new plant breeding and testing station in Waterford.
The 50-acre site at Ballycanvan outside Waterford city is the DLF research and development site for Ireland. The crops being trialled are grass, maize, beet and a host of fodder crops and catch/cover crops.
Two trials
General manager Paul Flanagan says that having the site in Ireland will ensure that the best varieties under Irish conditions will rise to the top. On the grass side, there are two types of trials going on: one with 16,000 grass plants in a single plant nursery with the plan to increase this to 50,000 plants by 2018. The purpose of the nursery is to select the best varieties as parents for next-generation crossing and for progression to field trials and seed yield trials.
There are currently 800 grass plots at the site with DLF varieties on field trials. These are managed under Department of Agriculture protocols, measuring quality and yield parameters under silage and intensive grazing regimes.
Grass breeding is a numbers game
Grass breeding is a very slow process. It takes at least 18 years for a variety to be on the recommended lists and available for farmers to buy. DLF currently has 10 varieties on the recommended lists and pasture profit index.
“Grass breeding is a numbers game,” says Paul Flanagan. “We will plant 800 candidate varieties for the recommended list trials and will get approximately four varieties recommended. It’s a 0.005% success rate,’’ he says.
DLF has a range of cover crop seed mixtures available, which are suitable for the €155/ha payment under GLAS and some of these mixtures were on display. It also has demonstration plots for forage crops. The hybrid rape/kale variety Interval was sown and looked impressive. In UK trials, this variety outperformed the popular variety Redstart with higher yield and quality characteristics.
It looks to be a good year for maize with many varieties on trial over 8ft tall. DLF has three research sites in Ireland with over 100 varieties on trial with and without plastic. The variety Corfinio is the most exciting and the company hopes that this will make the recommended lists next year.
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