National Variety Trials: Overview

What is arguably the world's largest comparative crop testing program, the National Variety Trials, is under new management. The annual trials are now fully funded and administered by the Grains Research and Development Corporation. It's a major change that includes the appointment of dedicated NVT staff to oversee 650 trial sites and evaluate thousands of crop varieties, including pulses, oilseeds and cereals. We have Anything up to 2000 different varieties and breeders lines covering 10 different crop species and sorghum variety trials have also commenced this year as another milestone of this transformation that's going on with the NVT system. On this particular site at Palmer in South Australia's Mallee, the focus is wheat. 42 main season wheat varieties are being trialled. What's gathered through the season is a lot of information on things like early vigour, tillering, habit, flowering, date, lodging and head loss. Then at the end of the season, of course, grain yield is paramount. That's measured in addition to grain quality characteristics. Disease resistance assessments also will be taken so varieties can be ranked and temperature sensors take readings every 15 minutes for use in assessing frost and heat stress events. Nationally, the biggest impact on this year's trials will come from drought affected regions. We're seeing a lot of situations where trials just weren't sown, but in also a lot of cases, as we're seeing here, the trials that were sown were sown quite late. So can a dry year such as this one produce meaningful data? 2006 through to 2009 was a run of dry seasons and in those seasons varieties like Gladius wheat were very prominent in trial performance data. And those sorts of seasons have are quite important for gauging the drought stress tolerance of varieties. And that's part of the Australian conditions for growing wheat. Gladius went on to become a recommended variety for cropping regions stretching from the Victorian Mallee to WA until it was eventually superseded. More data for more crops will give growers even more information about varietal selection and and NVT regional staff will help keep growers informed. Having staff located within each of the regions is going to enable much better hands on coordination of the work going on in each region. So extension and communication will also be a part of these roles. Anyone wanting information about this year's national variety trials can contact GRDC's NVT managers and to find out how to navigate the database and interpret the data and search for more NNVT videos on GRDC's YouTube channel.