United Kingdom - New and innovative varieties in Syngenta plots at Cereals 2023

Newly recommended and ground-breaking barley varieties, plus a new potential bread-making winter wheat variety. All will be exhibited in plots on the Syngenta stand at this year’s Cereals Event (13 and 14 June, 2023, Thoresby Estate, Perlethorpe, Newark, Nottinghamshire NG22 9EQ).

New winter wheat variety

An AHDB Recommended List candidate, new winter wheat, SY Cheer, has been selected as a potential bread-making variety, says Syngenta seeds marketing manager, Kathryn Hamlen.

″SY Cheer has high quality potential, in terms of specific weight, protein and Hagberg,″ says Mrs Hamlen, ″while its combination of untreated yield and disease resistance makes SY Cheer an attractive option agronomically. It has also been extremely stable, with consistent performance across different seasons.″

New hybrid winter feed barley

New for this autumn and also in plots on the Syngenta stand are the new hybrid winter feed barley varieties, SY Nephin and SY Buzzard.

″Hybrid barley is known for its vigorous growth, but both SY Nephin and SY Buzzard add to this with other useful disease characteristics,″ says Syngenta seeds technical expert, Ben Urquhart.

″A new addition to the AHDB winter barley Recommended List (RL) for 2023-24, SY Nephin has high treated and untreated yields, and combines these with the highest figure for Rhynchosporium resistance on the 2023-24 winter barley RL, of 8.

″Meanwhile, SY Buzzard, which is an AHDB Recommended List candidate will be available on a limited scale for autumn 2023, and marks the start of our journey of bringing hybrid barleys with barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV) tolerance to the market. BYDV tolerance is highly relevant currently. We will discuss this further as we head to autumn.″

Winter malting barley

Innovation in barley continues in the Syngenta plots with the ground-breaking non-GN winter malting variety, SY Vessel, says Kathryn Hamlen. ″This special quality of being non-GN means that, unusually for winter malting barley – which is normally targeted only at brewing – SY Vessel also has potential for malt distilling. SY Vessel has full UK National Listing and there are contracts available from certain maltsters.″

New spring barley

Meanwhile, among the spring barley varieties in plots on the Syngenta stand will be the new variety, SY Tennyson. A new addition to the AHDB spring barley Recommended List (RL) for 2023, SY Tennyson is under test for both malt distilling and brewing, says Kathryn Hamlen.

″SY Tennyson has the highest UK treated yield figure of varieties under test for both of these end markets on the AHDB spring barley 2023 RL,″ says Mrs Hamlen. ″It has demonstrated high quality in official  tests and represents our next generation of spring malting barley.″