Aleksandra winter barley, released to the market last autumn and featured in the 2023 Agrovista Cereal Seed brochure offers growers the opportunity to reduce the use of fungicides due to its superb disease resistance.
Such flexibility is particularly beneficial to growers who use contractors to spray crops. Having to wait for equipment to arrive, or with outlying fields wihch are difficult to monitor daily, growers can sow Aleksandra and be comfortable that disease will not build thus possibly needing a greater dose or more expensive product before the issue can be addressed.
Breeder trials in Ireland, where wet-weather disease pressure is typically higher than England and Wales, indicate how Aleksandra is able to cope.
Aleksandra is a two-row feed barley with exceptional disease resistance and the highest untreated yield and specific weight of any variety available today
Treated yield on par with KWS Tardis in Agrovista and breeder trials
Untreated yield highest of any variety three years running
Medium to long strawed perfectly suited to livestock farmers - easy to manage feed variety with max straw yield
PGR recommended
"Data highlights a low number of trials in dataset and cannot be presumed accurate."
Grain quality
There is a direct link between Aleksandra's disease resistance and its superb specific weight. Unlike wheat where yield is reliant on a disease-free leaf one and two, in barley earlier infections pre-GS31 are more important. These can reduce photosynthetic area, restrict tillering and result inlower yields. Foliar disease infections after GS 39 can result in smaller grains and higher screenings. Nevertheless, in most situations fungicides will boost yield and keep crops healthy as they develop through growth stages and through canopy greening or growth regulatory effects.
One of the outstanding qualities of Aleksandra is its exceptionally high specific weight, in fact it has the highest specific weight of any winter barley trialled to date through the AHDB Variety (VL) and Recommended List (RL) candidacy trials, better than the previous best KWS Cassia with an additional 14% higher yield untreated. With high specific weight comes consistency of yield - whatever the weather yield is safeguarded by the genetic capability of the plant to build starch at maximum efficiency.
Aleksandra also has notably lower screenings than rival varieties, in fact the lowest screening losses of all winter barley varieties in RL trials 2023.
Standing ability
Aleksandra is a medium to long strawed variety that will benefit from a comprehensive plant growth regulator programme when following a break crop or grown in highly fertile situations. Official trials grown in the UK and Ireland have experienced various levels of lodging, but it is important to explain that variety trials are managed by average plant growth stage and therefore treatments may not be applied at their optimum time. Furthermore, trials specifically to assess lodging are generally grown in highly fertile situations and managed to maximise the risk of lodging occurring, following a break crop of peas by example. Where grown in a more typical winter barley situation, such as a second or third cereal or on lighter soils, then lodging has not been an issue.
