Gema

Variety Positioning

A Farmers View

Moving to earlier varieties has delivered more versatility and reliability in increasingly challenging growing seasons.

In 2022, we moved away from growing traditional mainstream maize varieties, on the advice we received from Agrii, and invested into newer and earlier genetic.

All the time being conscious that we did not want to compromise on overall yield and quality – for both forage for our AD plant and grain production.

Although we are in a favourable region of the UK to grow maize, earlier harvest dates should always be considered, especially when we’re looking to establish crops after harvest.

Gema was selected as a new and much improved Ultra Early option, initially for grain production, but with the fallback that it would produce a very early crop of forage maize if we needed it, for any given reason.

In our first year, we saw an improvement of two to three weeks in harvest date to what we had been growing previously and no compromise in yields at all.

The crop also matured naturally, rather than gaining that ultra-earliness from rapid die back and losing flexibility for us at harvest.

Our 350 acres of maize cropping is split 65% for forage and 35% for grain and our land can range considerably from Grade 1 all the way to Grade 3 type quality.

Gema has performed incredibly well for us across all soil types.

In 2022, harvest for AD feedstock was completed by the third week of August with yields averaging 20 tonnes per acre and that sown for grain production was safely in the shed by the end of September.

So far, Gema has yielded 5 tonnes per acre for grain production this year on some very poor ground and through testing growing conditions.

Although Gema is clearly a large step forward compared to existing Ultra Early varieties on the Descriptive List, we believe Gema reliably outperforms that data when harvested at a more commercial timing.

We believe that Gema has really pushed us forward in terms of securing an earlier harvest date, maintaining high yields and quality whilst allowing us to remain flexible within our system, should we need it.

Clive & Richards Apps | Boxted Lodge Farm, Kent