Onions
Innovation Focus
Across our onion growers we run trails across our growers estates, to improve agronomic, storage and quality traits.
Through out trialling process we are pursuing three focused agronomic projects to improve quality attributes:
- Evaluation of Fusarium treatments in drip irrigation for improved yield, uniformity and bulb quality in maincrop.
- Enhancing early crop vigour and health.
- More for less – optimising crop nutrition by utilising a combination of novel controlled release granules, foliar feeds and timely targeted top dressings.
By working together G's Growers are farming across diverse and varied regions with a diversity of soil types, with the aim to ensure a consistency of onions throughout the UK season"
Evaluation of Fusarium treatments in drip irrigation for improved yield, uniformity and bulb quality in maincrop
Objectives
- To compare the effect of products applied via drip irrigation on Fusarium spp. expression.
- To evaluate for each product the gross yield, saleable yield and bulb quality.
- To evaluate costs associated with each product and end to end cost of each treatment, relative to existing commercial production.
Targeted Benefits
- Increased gross yield
- Reduced spoilage/losses in storage
- Improved understanding to optimise use of drip irrigation; improved yield, uniformity and quality.
- Increased market competitiveness
Enhancing early crop vigour and health
Objectives
- To compare the effect of contrasting seed treatments on crop establishment, vigour and health.
- To evaluate the effect of enhancements injected at drilling on crop establishment, vigour and health.
- To compare the combined effects of 1) and 2) above.
- To investigate the benefit of applying ozone just prior to the inoculation of mycorrhizae and Johnson-Su.
Targeted Benefits
- Improved crop establishment, yield and uniformity.
- Potential suppression of Fusarium basal rot.
More for less – Optimising crop nutrition by utilising a combination of novel controlled release granules, foliar feeds and timely targeted top dressings
Objectives
- To compare the efficacy of contrasting nutrition regimes (combined with foliar feeds and top dressings) with ammonium nitrate applications for promoting crop foliar development and delivering bulb size, yield and quality.
- To record any differences in crop development and fall over from controlled release nitrogen treatments.
- To quantify the effect of regimes on high value grade sizes (70mm+)
Targeted Benefits
- Insight into alternatives to conventional nitrogen fertilisers.
- Improved understanding of the use of alternative nitrogen products.
- Optimised nitrogen use efficiency and better environmental practices.
Alongside our agronomic trials we are also testing new automation solutions such as ecorobotix
The ecorobotix system delivers ultra-targeted application of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides or fertilisers.
Our onion growers have been trialing ecorobotix technology for the past 12 months. The technology sprays a selective herbicide targeting weeds such as broadleaf and grassy weeds. Up to 7.5 km/h, weeds are successfully detected by the camera and sprayed by the machine.
The visual recognition system detects weeds, whatever their development stage, even at a very early stage: just after germination, when they’re still at the seedling stage, they’re recognised by the typical shape of the cotyledons and the two first leaves.
No weed is ignored. Even more, no onion bulb is wrongly identified as a weed.
The algorithm detects weeds when they are located close to or even on the onion plant. The mix of shapes and colours doesn’t trump the visual recognition system.
