Resolute

Variety Positioning

Resolute offers the highest combined DM and ME yield of any variety on the 2022 Descriptive List. Resolute achieves an earlier harvest yet maintains massive overall yields when compared to much later material. UK maize production must adapt for ever changing futures and Resolute already holds many of the answers. The big hitting variety for any UK grower!

Key Points:

• EARLY
• FAO 190
• 104% Relative DM yield
• 18.9 Tonnes DM per Ha
• 102% Relative starch yield
• 6.28 Tonnes starch per Ha
• 104% Relative ME yield
• 221 GJ ME per Ha

A Farmers View

Careful variety selection has enabled maize to become a core ingredient feeding a Yorkshire farm’s anaerobic digestion plant.

Using maize as a key feedstock wasn’t the original plan, or even plan B, when we commissioned our anaerobic digestion plant in 2014 at our farm in Knottingley near Pontefract in West Yorkshire.

When we started, we thought we could primarily rely on grass silage, but we quickly found grass wasn’t as efficient at producing gas as we’d hoped, and it floated within the system when fed.

That’s when we turned to maize backed up by hybrid rye. About two thirds of the farm’s 280 ha is dedicated to producing maize and hybrid rye for the digester, with around 48 ha of the maize ground growing forage rye, which is used as a sandwich crop between the maize.

Maize has a number of advantages for energy production for us. It produces lots of biomass and feeds into the AD plant well as it doesn’t float much, as long as it is harvested at the correct dry matter.

Gas production is also high, and we look to achieve around 400 cubic metres of methane per tonne with the maize compared with 300 for hybrid rye.

Our farm is right at the northern tip of where there are enough cumulative day degrees to allow crops to reach maturity by the target September harvest date. However, variety trials on the farm, which is also the site of Agrii’s Brotherton iFarm, highlighted that varieties such as Resolute were early enough to reach maturity by that date, while also fitting the other key characteristics of being a very high yielding variety with good standing ability and energy production.

We regularly achieve average yields of 50-60 T per ha at 30-32% dry matter with Resolute.

Ensuring we are achieving the highest yields, maximum quality and an early harvest is key to us going forward, and Resolute delivers that every year.

Booth Brothers I Smeathalls Farm, West Yorkshire