Plant breeders Nickerson gave details at a press briefing yesterday, 29 May, of a record number of candidate wheat varieties in the ground now that are coming up for consideration for next year’s HGCA Recommended List.

“We have six new winter wheat varieties and one spring wheat in RL trials this year,” announced Nickerson cereals product manager Lee Robinson, speaking at the company’s wheat breeding centre at Woolpit, Suffolk.  “We believe this is a record and promises growers and end users a welcome and widened choice for 2009 onwards.”

“We have already announced the release of Panorama, a potential bread-making winter wheat with the highest untreated and treated yield of all this year’s candidate bread-making varieties, and of Cassius as a new potential Group 3 variety which has a good agronomic profile and is potentially suitable for early sowing in the autumn.”

Nickerson will be submitting two other bread-making wheats along with Panorama:  QPlus, a potential Group 1 bread-making wheat that would be an ideal partner for leading Group 1 variety Solstice, with the added benefit of resistance to orange wheat blossom midge.  Also Walpole, which has a very high yield potential, and is similar to Xi19 in agronomic type.

The company’s list of six RL candidate winter wheats was completed by two Group 4 feed varieties: Lear is a soft milling wheat with a range of end use markets and a unique combination of characteristics to counter Septoria and orange wheat blossom midge. While Bantam is targeted at the the hard milling wheat market and is potentially suited to the early sowing slot.

Mr Robinson rounded off the list with Buckingham, which is a new spring wheat with bread-making potential.  He also noted that both Panorama and Cassius are already available in limited quantities to growers for sowing this autumn.