Preliminary summaries for WSU soft white winter wheat trials and CL/AX trials at Ritzville, Walla Walla, Dusty, and Lamont are now available on the WSU Small Grains Website.
Soft White Winter
Each of these trials have had some unique challenges this year.
Ritzville was hit hard by cold damage this winter and some entries more or less froze out, which is evident by some of the very low yields. Cold damage ratings along with early emergence ratings are included in the PDF table for context. Yields were exceptionally high; so much so that I went back and double checked all of my calculations, but did not find any conversion errors.
When looking at the Walla Walla data, please keep in mind this trial was accidentally overfertilized which caused significant lodging. There were some variety rankings this year that definitely deviated from past rankings at this site, some of which may be explained from the lodging. Yields were exceptionally high here as well.
At Dusty, our hoe drill did not play nicely with the residue at this site this past fall. While stands appeared to be reduced visually, the trial looked pretty uniform overall and the CV is quite low, so I think the data is reliable. Test weights were on the lower side.
For the winter trials at Lamont, I would like to point out that in addition to some minor winter freeze injury, this trial exhibited some significant cephalosporium stripe injury. While differences among varieties were significant, the injury was not completely uniform across the trial which led to higher CV values in the SWW and CL/AX trials. Both cold injury and cephalosporium stripe ratings are included in the tables.
Several trials were abandoned this year. Both Lind and Connell were abandoned. Lind was EXCEPTIONALLY dry early on. We were able to hit moisture at about 9”, but was mostly planted to get emergence ratings since many varieties won’t make it that far. We replanted the trial within a few days of when the farm manager planted his winter wheat for the first time only to have the trial crust on us. Both the trial and the surrounding field were abandoned due to poor stands. We attempted to plant Connell into chem fallow again this year, but were unsuccessful with our drill. We replanted the trial but again ran into stand and weed issues. We will be going back to a traditional summer fallow, dust mulch system for the upcoming season. For our irrigated growers out there, we had to unfortunately abandon our Pasco irrigated site as well. The trial itself was excellent and faired well during the January cold snap, but it was planted into a fall planted DNS field which froze out and the grower terminated it and replanted the field into beans.
CL/AX
A couple of surprise rankings at Ritzville for the CL/AX trial with Curiosity CL+ doing surprisingly well and saw much more separation between Sockeye CL+ and Piranha CL+ than usual. If you glance at the emergence ratings, keep in mind that these were taken only 9 days after planting and so are more indicative of emergence speed than overall emergence. Hence, LCS Kraken AX only scored an “8” and yet still topped the trial for yield. Appleby CL+ mostly died out from winterkill.
At Walla Walla, Nova AX won out among the CoAXium varieties. I was surprised to see Piranha CL+ and Sockeye CL+ stand as well as they did under the high N rate. The LCS Shine definitely went down under the high N rate, which is consistent with what I have heard from growers. The HRW rankings at Walla Walla were very consistent with what we’ve seen in the past.
Perhaps most surprising result of all was Appleby CL+ topping the trial at Dusty. The grower reported a late frost on his field (mostly in the draws) and I can only speculate that it may have somehow avoided some minor damage OR it may have just avoided some of the extreme heat experienced in July since it is the earliest variety.
View the preliminary summaries for WSU soft white winter wheat trials and CL/AX trials on the 2024 Variety Testing webpage.
Written by Clark Neely who is no longer with WSU. For questions or comments, please contact us at small.grains@wsu.edu.