High Resilience Hybrid Shows its Strength in National Farm Trials

High resilience hybrid, DK Excentric is showing its strength with a yield-topping performance in the first field-scale trials to be harvested this season in Bayer’s National Hybrid Proving Programme.  

Validated yield data reveal the newly introduced variety averaged 4.59t/ha across five very different farm conditions and regimes in Hampshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. This is 104% of the eight mainstream ‘00’ variety mean and a good 3% ahead of the leading RL hybrid comparator.

“While DK Excentric performed well across all the sites, it demonstrated its particular resilience by excelling under the most challenging farm conditions,” pointed out trials manager, Richard Williams. “Here it was one of only three varieties to yield over 3t/ha, outperforming the leading RL hybrid comparator by more than 30%.” 

Season-long monitoring of the variety strips grown side-by-side under the farms’ own commercial regimes showed DK Excentric had particularly good early vigour, was uniform in its establishment and developed rapidly in both the autumn and spring to produce an average spring plant population nicely on target at 34 plants/m2.    “Interestingly, our new hybrid had the highest average yield per plant at 13.7g across the five sites,” Mr Williams observed. This was fully 7% above the trial mean and almost certainly reflects a superior branching ability; something that probably goes a long way to explaining the notable performance advantage it had on the lowest yielding site.”