Breaking the Mould: Why Lamport AgX Is Rewriting the Rulebook on Variety Selection

If the recent Limagrain demonstration day in Staffordshire highlighted a growing frustration with the rigid confines of the Recommended List (RL), Agrovista’s Lamport AgX open day in Northamptonshire provided a masterclass in what happens when you step outside them.

Now in its 13th harvest, Lamport AgX is Agrovista’s flagship trial site, a long-running agronomic research platform that has evolved from a blackgrass battleground into what those who run it describe as a “toy box”, where convention is routinely challenged.

As always, Niall Atkinson, Agrovista’s farming systems R&D advisor, was on hand to talk us through many of the trials, with a welcome from John Tanner, Agrovista’s commercial director. The Sprinter Wheats discussion was led by Ted Williams, specialist for the Sprinter Wheats programme, supported by Mark Hemmant, Agrovista agronomist. The focus at Lamport is not on pushing high-input genetics to their absolute yield limits, but on finding resilient, system-based solutions for real-world farming challenges.

The rise of the “Sprinter Wheats”

The standout discussion of the day centred on Sprinter Wheats, a genetically diverse group of white-grained wheats boasting both winter and spring genetics, developed and championed by the specialist Sprinter Wheats programme in partnership with Agrovista.

The development of these varieties was born out of sheer practical necessity. As an industry, the push for later drilling to control blackgrass has been successful in reducing weed burdens, but it comes with a severe penalty: establishing a crop in the worsening weather, shorter days, and wetter soils of late autumn and winter is notoriously difficult.

Agrovista and the Sprinter Wheats team went looking for a solution. Finding nothing suitable among UK breeders, and coming up empty in Denmark and France, they eventually found what they needed in Germany. The breeding company Strube, recently acquired by RAGT, had developed bread-making varieties designed to be drilled after late-lifted crops like sugar beet, with the flexibility to be sown right through to the spring if autumn conditions proved impossible. Crucially, these varieties carry no vernalisation requirement, meaning they will not fail to produce a head in a mild winter, a growing risk for conventional winter wheats pushed into late-drilling slots as winters warm.

However, when it came to getting these varieties officially recognised in the UK, the limitations of the Recommended List system became glaringly obvious. “The last thing you could possibly want to do with it is put it in a September drilling slot into the winter wheat candidacy,” Ted explained, because their rapid development speed means they would be pushing out a flag leaf by December.

Instead, they were entered into the spring wheat slot, where STR Pace, Agrovista’s first Sprinter Wheat, subsequently emerged as the highest-yielding Group 1 spring wheat.

This mirrors the frustration voiced at the Limagrain event regarding the variety Rebellion. Rebellion was rejected from the RL because it missed a headline yield target, despite possessing the very traits – excellent untreated yield, strong disease resistance and early maturity – that farmers actually need for lower-input systems. In both cases, the rigid categorisation of the RL struggles to accommodate genetics that offer systemic, rotational benefits rather than simply topping a high-input yield table.

The yellow rust threat: A shared concern

Another common thread linking the two demo days was the growing alarm over yellow rust. At Limagrain, Ron Granger highlighted that nearly 50 per cent of the hard feed wheat market relies on varieties susceptible to the recent WR15 breakdown, exposing a dangerously narrow genetic base.

The Agrovista team echoed this concern. When they initially brought German varieties over for screening, they found them highly susceptible to UK strains of yellow rust, a reminder that different countries carry different pathogen populations, and that importing genetics is not a simple shortcut. It took further screening of different genetic mixtures to find robust varieties. The message from both events is clear: the UK needs broader genetic diversity to combat evolving disease threats, and the current RL system may not be moving fast enough to provide it.

Thirteen years of evidence: What the Lamport systems show

One of the most compelling arguments made at Lamport was not about a new variety or a new product, it was about time. Systems 3 and 4 at the site have now been growing spring wheat continuously for 13 harvests, using cover crops and direct drilling as the primary tools for grassweed management. The early sceptics who predicted that blackgrass would simply adapt to become a spring germinator have been proved wrong. “We are not getting any grass weed return even after 13 years,” Niall confirmed. “And we’re getting all the soil health benefits from those cover crops.”

The subtle but important difference between the two plots illustrates how far the thinking has evolved. System 3 involves a small amount of soil movement in the autumn ahead of the cover crop. System 4 has had no meaningful soil disturbance at all for years; the cover crop is always direct drilled. Agrovista agronomist Chris Martin recently conducted a slake test under the System 4 plots and found water infiltrating straight through the profile, matching the soil structure found under an undisturbed hedgerow. System 7, by contrast, where no cover crop has ever been grown, showed water puddling on the surface. The visual difference between the plots told its own story.

Italian ryegrass, however, is an emerging challenge. A strip of ryegrass was accidentally introduced to the site years ago by a contractor whose drill hygiene was not what it should have been. “It’s been getting worse and worse,” Niall acknowledged. The current approach is to put the affected strip down to a cutting mix of grass and legumes for two to three years, exhausting the Italian ryegrass seedbank rather than relying on chemistry. Even a visiting Australian study group, farmers who have access to a much wider range of herbicides than UK growers, had no better answer when they saw the plot.

Rethinking nutrition: The last 50 kilos

While the AHDB RL trials continue to test varieties under optimal, high-nitrogen regimes (sometimes exceeding 300kg/ha), the conversation at Lamport was firmly focused on efficiency and reduction.

“We know we can do a lot better than 60 per cent nitrogen use efficiency,” it was noted, with Lamport achieving up to 80 per cent NUE. The focus is on replacing the last 50-60kg/ha of applied nitrogen with more efficient alternatives. This includes foliar nitrogen (such as MZ28), nitrogen-fixing endophytes (such as Tiros Max or Nuvenio), and biostimulants (such as Twoxo or PGA) that regulate nitrogen metabolism and encourage the plant to scavenge more efficiently.

Perhaps the most striking discussion was on phosphate. Soil tests at Lamport showed an Olsen P of 50 parts per million (Index 4.2) – a healthy index by conventional standards, yet tissue tests consistently showed the crop was deficient. The reason is that standard soil testing measures only the tiny fraction of phosphate in soil solution, ignoring the vast reserves locked up in compounds with calcium, magnesium, iron and aluminium. When Agrovista measured total soil phosphate at Lamport, the figure came to 1,151 parts per million. Converting that to phosphate at a bulk density of 1.2 to 15cm depth, the site holds approximately 4,744kg of phosphate per hectare, worth around £6,168 at current TSP prices. “And yet we still go and bring phosphate from Morocco and spread it on here,” it was noted. “Within days, it’s turned back to rock again.”

By using innovative products to liberate existing soil phosphate rather than applying more granular TSP, Agrovista demonstrated a £70/ha saving while achieving better crop uptake. This system-wide approach to nutrition, focusing on biology and efficiency rather than total applied units, aligns perfectly with the government’s Farming Roadmap vision of a lower-input future, a reality the RL trials are not currently designed to reflect.

As the Bayer demonstration would show just days later, the pressure on chemistry is intensifying from the regulatory direction too, making the case for resilient genetics and efficient nutrient management even more urgent.