Despite difficult conditions last season, Blackstone performed for one Scottish farmer and as a result the wheat variety will feature in his rotation, with the goal being distilling premiums.

Haddington-based James Kennedy says it was his first time growing the Group 4 soft wheat. “As a business we’ve only ever grown Group 2s and 3s. So, when we accepted the offer to grow Blackstone from seed merchant Dods of Haddington last year, we knew we were stepping into uncharted territory,” he explains.

James drilled 17ha on 15 October when conditions were initially good. “However, just a couple of days after applying the pre-em herbicide, the heavens opened and we seriously began to wonder if someone had left a tap running in the sky.

“Despite enduring horrendous rain and coming through the winter and early spring unscathed, by February the Blackstone crop was still at least two weeks behind and we were desperate to get onto the heavy fields and apply some nutrition to the crop.”

Nutrition

He says three nitrogen splits totalling 169kgN/ha were applied on 29 February, 12 March and 20 April. With the wet weather finally beginning to abate, the crop caught up on its growth stages and the fungicide programme began in April.

“Septoria can be very challenging in Eastern Scotland, so we always try to stay fairly robust on spray programmes using our go-to fungicide Inatreq (fenpicoxamid)+ prothioconazole as our main flag leaf spray.

“Thankfully, it wasn’t a high pressure septoria season, and Blackstone was still showing three clean leaves by the time we’d applied our T3 in late June,” says James.

Harvest data

Come harvest on 30 August, Blackstone yielded 11.66t/ha at 15% moisture, which was 1t/ha above the farm’s five-year average.

“In view of the extreme weather, plus the fact it was our first time with a Group 4, we were blown away with the final yield results. We’re a mixed farm, so straw yield is also very important, and the variety certainly didn’t disappoint here either producing 4.2t/ha of tall, stiff straw,” he adds.

“Blackstone is a taller variety than we’d normally grow but despite this, we had no lodging or flattening issues and it stood very well, showing good resilience during a testing season.”

Post-harvest grain samples confirmed a specific weight of 81.8kg/hl, a Hagberg falling number of 350 and a protein content of 9.4%. James says although he’d have liked to have seen a protein percentage closer to 10, with a tough year across the board on protein, he won’t judge it too harshly.

Sterility trials

John Miles, seed technical manager for Agrii, says he’s also positive about the variety’s future. This is because he sees Blackstone’s flexible drilling window and two year performance in Agrii’s Scottish based sterility trials as major positives for many northern and Scottish growers.

“To enable Scottish growers to make better informed variety decisions we’ve been running our sterility trials in Aberdeenshire since 2018. To be deemed suitable for the Scottish market we generally look for a sterility score of less than 10%, with scores closer to 5% identifying varieties as being highly suitable for many of the growing conditions farmers face north of the border,” explains John.

Looking at the data set for the past two years, Blackstone, from independent breeder Elsoms Seeds, recorded 6.2% in 2023 and 4.8% in 2024 giving it a mean average of 5.5% across the past two years.

“That puts Blackstone in the top two or three best performing varieties on sterility, making it highly suitable for all areas which have potential sterility risks. Add that data to it’s very wide sowing window and you have a winter wheat that many Scottish growers should be taking a keen interest in,” he concludes.