Impressive milling wheat yields are being recorded at a farm near Chichester, West Sussex, where grower Nick Baird is seeing weighbridge figures soar above 14t/ha in two fields, which could be a new British milling wheat record.

Mr Baird, of New Barn Farm in Funtington, says his winter wheat variety Crusoe yielded 14.13t/ha over a 36.6ha field and 14.08t/ha over another 24.2ha. Protein levels stood at 13.09% and 13.75% respectively.

Although there is no official record set for milling wheat yields in the UK, Norfolk grower Mark Means set the benchmark in 2013 after he won an ADAS yield competition with his crop of Coridale averaging 13.41t/ha.

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The mega figures have been verified over a weighbridge by local co-operative grain store Chichester Grain, after the grain was corrected to 15% moisture.

Mr Baird said: “We are pretty pleased, it has been a good harvest for us this year. It’s the first year we’ve grown Crusoe and we’ll definitely be growing it again.”

The 36.6ha field of wheat was combined on 4 August at 15.74% moisture, giving an average Hagberg of 316 and a pleasing specific weight averaging out at 80kg/hl.

This year Mr Baird grew a total of 111ha of Crusoe with 50ha of Skyfall winter wheat on his chalk loam soil, drilled on 24 September.

“We are quite a large-scale pig farm, so we’ve been historically applying the manure across the rotation according to NVZ regulations and we’ve also made the switch to liquid fertiliser application this year,” he adds.

Mr Baird’s AICC agronomist Peter Cowlrick, of CCC Ltd, put the pleasing yields down to good establishment conditions, coupled with a carefully tailored agronomy input based on a full fertiliser programme using variable rate application and a robust fungicide regime.

He explained the crop established very evenly with good, strong tillers. Deep-Nitrogen sampling of the fields in February showed there was between 50kg and 100kg of N left in the top 90cm of soil.

“A four-split N programme totalling 250kg was used, with the first application as a flat rate liquid N+S, followed by two more variable liquid applications and finally a solid application of 40kg of N at the flag leaf stage.”

A foliar urea application was then made when grains were milky ripe.

“This approach would appear to have worked very well. Achieving the protein was always going to be a challenge despite the high yields,” added Mr Cowlrick.