EXCEPTIONAL yield and quality over the past few seasons were the deciding factors for Coorow grower Gavin Broun to expand his Vixen plantings this year, making it his main wheat variety in 2022.
Along with his wife Christine and parents Winston and Maureen, Mr Broun operates a 2200 hectare mixed cropping farm, with about 1100ha of wheat and the remainder of the program planted to canola and lupins.
Vixen wheat, from breeder InterGrain, caught Mr Broun's eye in the National Variety Trials (NVT) where he hosted the Coorow NVT site on his property in 2017 and 2018.
He trialled the quick-maturing, Australian Hard (AH) and Australian Hard Noodle (AHN) variety in 2019 across his Coorow and Carnamah properties and has been suitably impressed over the past three years.
"We saw Vixen early on in NVTs and were impressed with its ability to yield well in tighter finishes, so jumped at the opportunity to bulk it up in 2019," Mr Broun said.
"Vixen has proven a great fit for our system, particularly with its ability to handle the drier seasons which we see up this way fairly often - when the tap turns off in the middle of August, as it did in 2020, we saw Vixen's ability to hold on and maintain its yield and grain quality.
"We know that we are trending towards quicker finishes which is where we see Vixen as being a very reliable option for our system."
Given the excellent results over the past few seasons, Mr Broun has replaced Scepter in his wheat program with Vixen.
"Last year we were impressed with Vixen's yield in a longer growing season," he said.
"In the past we have found the quick-maturing wheats haven't had the top end yield in the better seasons and we have been pleased with Vixen's performance across a range of seasons."
In 2021 the Broun's Vixen averaged 2.8 tonnes per hectare across the farm after sowing at 60 kilograms per hectare.
"Frost is not typically a challenge for us in the north however, we did see a bit of frost damage across the farm last year and we learnt that delaying sowing Vixen until the second week of May is necessary to reduce our frost risk," Mr Broun said.
"Vixen's grain quality last season was also excellent, our protein was down compared to other years, like most wheat across the region, although Vixen's protein achievement was very good compared to Scepter and we had very low screenings across the board."
Vixen has strong physical grain characteristics, with good grain size and hectolitre weight and a strong protein accumulation capacity relative to yield potential.
It also has very good tillering and biomass growth capacity, a trait absent in many previous mid-quick wheat varieties.
Vixen is available through WA Seedclub Members and is a farmer-to-farmer trade approved variety.
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