Sponsored: Limagrain
Climate requires harvest-secure varieties
As a grower in the Netherlands, you notice it like no other: our climate and growing season are becoming increasingly erratic. In the past 3 years, all extremes were present: prolonged cold, extreme heat, acute drought, extreme precipitation and severe storms. How can you arm yourself against this in roughage cultivation?
On our expensive agricultural land, stable, high-quality roughage yields are crucial for the operating return and the continuity of the company. Farms with the highest kVEM yields per hectare have lower feed costs and therefore a significantly higher yield.
Safe variety selection
With every crop and especially with maize, a smart choice of varieties is the best way to arm yourself against extreme weather conditions. Select your varieties on the characteristics:
- earliness: maize varieties from the Variety List very early – early are only slightly inferior to mid-early varieties in terms of yield, but ensure an early harvest, with all the associated benefits.
- Agricultural quality: only choose maize varieties with high Variety List figures for firmness and disease resistance, which also live up to this in practice.
- Origin: LG maize varieties are the only ones developed in a real Dutch breeding program. They are therefore perfectly attuned to our climate.
Dutch maize breeding
From Rilland in Zeeland, breeder Louis Vlaswinkel and his team have been working on new ones for over 25 years maize varieties for cultivation in the Netherlands. On an extensive network of trial fields they breed varieties that score the very best in terms of nutritional value and harvest security under Dutch conditions, and this is reflected in the Recommended Variety List.
Harvest-secure construction plan
There are various options in the crop selection to make your crop plan extra harvest-secure. In addition to just grass and corn, take a look at alternative fodder crops:
- fodder beets deliver the highest kVEM per hectare, for example, even in less fertile years.
- Alfalfa roots very deeply and is therefore less sensitive to drought than grass.
- Legumes like field beans, peas en clovers fix their own nitrogen from the air and thus increase roughage yields with decreasing fertilization.
For more information about a harvest-secure construction plan in 2018:
View the LG corn varieties for 2018 of contact the LG roughage specialist for free advice.
