Combined research adds value

Chris Bean, Technical Manager – Crop Protection

Chris Bean

The coming together of UAP and Masstock has merged two businesses highly committed to practical agronomic research and development. Within the new Agrii organisation, this work is centred around the Throws Farm trials site but with significant regional investment across the whole of the UK including Northern Ireland. Both companies had significant on farm sites for both R&D work, agronomist and customer updating in the South West including the long established Masstock site known as AgriiFocus near Swindon. As part of the integration process the AgriiFocus site has become a major trials centre for the west of the country for both Agrii agronomists and customers, which will be developed further in the future.

Importantly both parts of the new business have been and remain committed to a holistic approach to agronomic development. Therefore development sites are there to look at a wide range of inter related factors which go towards producing a high yielding, high gross margin crop. On the AgriiFocus site, the relationships between varieties, seed treatments, fungicides and nutrition are under careful scrutiny in a range of arable crops including wheat, barley and oilseed rape.

In order to extract the maximum data value from the work done, the trials on these R&D sites is small plot and fully replicated so that Agrii agronomists can confidently work with the information and interpret it on farm for the benefit of Agrii customers.