After several years away from spring peas, farmer Andy Pearce, of South Lincolnshire based WA Pearce and Sons, drilled 20ha of the high yielding, green pea variety Greenway in late March across two sites made up of silt and black land soils.
He says: “There were a combination of factors involved in bringing spring peas back into our rotation this year. They are still the best entry for a following wheat, we needed to bring our 2022 harvest date forward having grown a lot of spring wheat the previous year – and, from a business perspective, both prices and domestic demand for peas have risen since we last grew the crop.
“Following an application of starter fertiliser at 100kg/ha, we drilled Greenway at a rate of 95 plants/ m2, with the crop establishing well on the back of some decent early April rain and staying ahead of our normal weed burden of thistles, speedwell, cleavers and mayweed. All went very smoothly up to mid-May, then we had no significant rain until our eventual harvest in late July.
“Having been caught out before with long dry spells, we were pro-active this time adding two applications of manganese and a foliar feed to our aphicide and pea moth sprays in May and June, along with an application of Signum (boscalid + pyraclostrobin) at 0.44L/ha on June 17th which helped the crop stay green and cope better with the drought conditions. The strategy worked well, and by June we had a healthy, still green crop that was standing waist high.
“Harvesting between the 21st and 25th of July, the overall yield was a respectable 2.75t/ha. Admittedly, not quite what we were originally looking for, but a very good result given the unprecedented dry spell. I have no doubt that, with more moisture, it would have been a 5t crop given the crop grew well and produced a lot of pods.
Echoing Andy’s positive assessment, Rebecca Gibson – Seed Manager for Agrii covering the North of England, highlights several marketing pluses offered by Greenway.
She says: “This is Agrii’s first full commercial year with Greenway and, on the whole, our customers have been impressed. With an excellent uniform seed size and good colour retention it has the key attributes that the end markets are looking at, both for human consumption and micronizing.
“For the grower, it’s high yielding, having achieved 109% of control in 2021 trials, has very good standing ability so it’s easy to harvest, and is agronomically strong with good downy mildew resistance. Based on our year one feedback I’d say it has shown significant promise”