Bringing balance to boosting crop performance, sustainability, and soil health, the OptiYield Core system is a new name for potato growers to conjure with.

With more than a decade of research and development in soil science and crop nutrition, Emerald Research (ERL) is putting this knowledge into helping potato and vegetable farmers balance sustainability with the increased yield and profitable crop production.

OptiYield Core is a tailored ‘ready to go’ programme from the company's CHIPS family, which is aimed at pinpointing each crop’s most important growth stages and targets these with the appropriate mixture of nutrients and biostimulant to maximise performance and minimise waste.

Trials of OptiYield Core products have consistently delivered improved marketable yields of potatoes, carrots, and other crops of between 12% and 25%, leading to significant increases in net ROI of between £500 and £1500 per ha,s aid ERL.

Long a champion of driving down on-farm inefficiencies and expenditure on fertiliser and pesticides and effective foliar, its MD, Simon Fox, said: “In order to improve agriculture’s sustainability, we need to stop throwing nitrogen and phosphate fertiliser directly onto the soil and hoping it reaches the roots.

"Not only is it a waste of physical inputs, with today’s prices it is literally pounds up in the sky as greenhouse gases, or down the drain in run-off! This is why most of the OptiYield products are foliar applications, all of which can be tank mixed together with conventional products to reduce the number of passes.”

It provides a package of nutrient and biostimulant products that have been developed from lab research, through to academic trial plots right the way through to farm field trials. This provided the basis for the OptiYield range of nutrition, biostimulant and biological products.

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The system caught the eye of Kincraigie Growers' director, Andrew Lorimer, who has over 30 years of operational experience in managing seed for ware and processing and trading in overseas markets.

Trials carried out by Kincraigie – a 150ha seed potato-growing operation based in central Perthshire – demonstrated the potential of OptiYield foliar treatments.

It supplies top quality, limited-generation seed for a range of varieties that are tailored to specific needs and supplied direct to end users. As well as producing higher yields of healthy vigorous seed and improving quality, OptiYield also fitted well with the business’s philosophy to move towards greater sustainability and becoming less reliant on chemistry.

“It’s clear that farmers will need to adapt rapidly to diminishing agrochemical availability as well as climate swings and changes,” said Mr Lorimer. “Crops will need to be robust, so understanding a plant’s needs using customised programmes using products designed to promote both crop and soil health has to be the way forward.”

Used commercially in 2018, treated crops had healthier canopies, larger root masses and more tubers with a more even size distribution. Mr Lorimer identified typical yield increases of 2.5 tonnes per ha, equating to an additional £500/ha profit and a significant increase in tuber numbers. In one independently verified test dig, a 9% increase was recorded.

“Crops certainly looked better than expected given there was no irrigation available. As well as greener canopies we saw increased stem numbers and reduced crop stress compared to our standard treatment,” he said.