Wheat varieties available for 2024 sowing

At the National Variety Trial site at Gerogery five new wheat varieties ready for next season sowing are being grown.

At the Riverine Plains Evan Moll Gerogery Field Day, NSW DPI technical specialist - grains, Peter Matthews, took growers through the varieties in the trial.

The new varieties are Leverage, LongReach Major, LongReach Tracer, Sundancer and Tomahawk CL Plus.

Leverage is a mid-slow maturity suited to late April/early May plantings and is closely related to Coolah but offers higher yield with a shorter plant type and improved stripe rust resistance.

LongReach Major is a mid-slow maturing spring wheat suitable for early to mid May seeding for southern NSW.

Major offers a good disease package for southern NSW and improved Septoria resistance over its Beckom parent.

Major has shown strong yield performance in both acidic and sodic soil yield trials.

LongReach Tracer is a mid spring maturing variety suitable for main season seeding in NSW and Queensland.

Tracer has shown strong performance in sodic soil yield trials and has a good disease package for northern production systems with excellent RLN tolerance. It has a compact canopy which could aid in stubble management in zero till farming systems.

Sundancer is a mid-slow spring maturing variety which is high yielding with excellent yield stability. Sundancer has an excellent rust resistance package and is slightly taller than LRPB Lancer and has shown better resistance to lodging.

Tomahawk CL Plus is a high yielding Scepter type with tolerance to Clearfield Intervix herbicide. It is agronomically similar to Scepter for maturity, physical grain quality and disease resistance, and has good sprouting tolerance.

Meanwhile cereal seed supply is expected to plentiful next season.

Baker Seed Co sales and business development manager, Aaron Giason, said they were trialling a new barley variety and several wheat varieties at the agronomy trial plots at Henty.

Mr Giason said the new barley variety Neo, was exciting.

"The barley could be quite significant with a yield increase and really good against disease," he said.

Mr Giason said the wheat varieties being trialled all had something different to offer.

"There is a lot of varieties going through that are that ANZAC day window for planting and give a bit of a different spectrum for disease that's out there as well as some grain quality," he said.

"In my opinion yield is always key and quality and disease is what we want to look at. Ideally we have everything as the highest quality, highest disease resistance but we don't seem to ever be able to get there."

Unlike last season Mr Giason said they had not seen too much disease pressure so far.

"It will be a matter of how those varieties perform and with wheat and barley it's about how they yield at the other end so we'll be looking pretty hard at the NVT results to see which varieties are the ones to go with," he said.

Mr Giason said despite drier conditions seed supply going forward was looking good.

"There is quite a lot of crops in - we obviously had some issues last year just because it was so wet and stayed so wet for so long," he said.

"We are seeing a drier finish but we would like to see a little bit of rain just put some cream on the crop that's there."

Mr Giason said it was pretty hot and dry but he still thought seed supply should be good for existing varieties and the new ones coming in.

"We've got good supply and production of those in the ground," he said.