Biostimulants to be tested on wheat, barley and oilseed rape

Ever since commercial farming commenced, the market has seen products which guarantee additional yield or improved quality in the crops to which the magical merchandise has been applied.

This growing season, two of Scotland’s Monitor Farms will take part in a Uk-wide trial. This will test the potential of using biostimulant – the fancy name for the products.

Runningoverthreeyears, the biostimulants will be tested on several combinable crops, including wheat, barley and oilseed rape.

One of the farms taking part in the trial is Corskie in Morayshire where farmer Iain Green has no previous experience with biostimulants but is keen to trial products which could improve crop yield.

“We are going to be trialling the biostimulant on two fields of spring barley and are really interested to measure its effect on yield. Up in Morayshire it can be very dry so anything that could improve rooting and cause less crop stress could be very beneficial.”

An AHDB review, completed in 2016, found evidence of a significant increase in yield in at least one experiment for nine of the 11 biostimulant product categories assessed.

Due to the biological nature of these products, consistent benefits were not observed in trials on cereals and data for oilseed rape was lacking. Gavin Dick, AHDB Knowledge Exchange Manager for Scotland, said, “The continuing development of targeted biostimulant products by major agrochemical companies means growers need to better understand the management requirements of these products under local field conditions to assess consistency of performance at a regional level.