Premer Shield sorghum competition awarded to Davidson family of Merrivale Partnership

While COVID-19 may have taken away the opportunity to hold the traditional Premer Field Day, which has been running since 1977, the prestigious crop competitions continued on.

The champion sorghum crop awarded the Premer Shield belonged to former 2009 winners the Davidson family, Merrivale Partnership, between Mullaley and Spring Ridge.

Back then they took out the award with the Pacific 2423 variety at 10t/ha.

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This year they took a chance and began planting sorghum on January 12 on the prayers of some rain.

The paddock had not harvested a crop since 2017 but about 240 hectares of Pioneer A66 was planted having been grown the year before.

"The main reason we planted it was we took a punt and we totally dry sowed it," Rob Davidson said.

"The profile underneath was quite full but there was literally 200mm of oven baked dry soil and we thought it was going to rain so we thought we would give it a big punt and see what happened.

"It basically started raining on it as soon as we finished planting."

Luck was on their side in more ways than one with the competition plot receiving around 70 millimetres of rain at the start of planting when some crop at the other end of the field only received 30 to 40 millimetres.

"That was the beginning of the rain and it just had rain all the time after that," he said.

"It didn't ever lack moisture."

The A66 crop was sown no till, using a Max Emerge with JD boxes on 75 cm rows.

A very even 62,000 plants/ha was established with the aid of 50 litres of Kickstart Z and had the benefit of 160 kg/ha of Urea which was spread in crop at 8-10 leaf stage.

NSW DPI Tamworth summer grains research agronomist Loretta Serafin said the crop had a small number of tillers, but was in excellent condition at judging, narrowly escaping frost damage, but standing well with 141,000 heads/ha.

"There was a very low percentage of off types and more importantly in this season a low number of infertile tillers," she said.

"The crop was estimated to yield 5.5 t/ha and scored 195 points."

Come harvest in early August the competition plot averaged about 8 t/ha.

Mr Davidson credited the win to a lot of luck.

They planted about 750 hectares of sorghum in total, not nearly as much as normal.

"It was too dry and when we did plant sorghum it was too late," he said.

"I would never normally plant sorghum at that time, the only reason we did was because the field had a lot of wheat stubble on it and I didn't want to put it through to wheat for disease reasons."

Currently the family have wheat and barley in the ground and while the season has been "magic" in comparison to recent years, they are still on knife's edge.

"If we don't get rain in the next week to 10 days there is going to be some serious yield reduction in this area," he said.

"We have just had a couple cracker frosts so we don't know what damage that has done."

He commended competition coordinator Simon Thompson and the Premer Field Day team for keeping the tradition alive this year.

Just two points behind in second was a crop of MR Taurus from Rorie Cadell, Kroombit, Premer, that was sown on November 14.

The crop was sown using a Max Emerge on a single skip row configuration to minimise the risk of failure.

The crop had been fortunate to pick up 280 mm of in crop rainfall.

"A total of 129,000 heads/ha was produced from a plant population of 55,650 plants/ha," Ms Serafin said.

Rob Cropper, Quirindi, placed third on 190 points with a crop of MR Buster sown in mid November into a paddock long fallowed from barley.

The crop was sown on 1m row spacing using a Max Emerge planter and established a plant population of 35,000 plants/ha.