Since some years, Cereal farmers have been looking for the variety of barley that best suits their terrain and weather conditions. This search could also be applicable to wheat, although we will focus on the different varieties of long-cycle barley or winter barley that exist today.
This is a search following the trial method, that is, based on trial and error, carried out by consulting with people specialized in the field and reading many research articles that are generated from a multitude of tests that commercial seed houses and public organizations carry out throughout the year… we could say that the search for the Holy Grail has reached cereals. And it is that with the great multitude of existing varieties, the yields can vary very significantly and, therefore, the choice of the correct variety is a very important factor. It is true that the final triumph does not depend only on the variety, but it is a great beginning to achieve success.
In our area and as an example, we “Twins’ Farm” and our father, for many years we have focused on the Hispanic variety, that has always given us very good results, but these conclusions have been changing for three or four years and today the decision has changed since we have been able to verify that there are other varieties of barley that, under equal agronomic conditions, yields are very different and therefore the benefit is greater. These varieties could be Planet, Nure, Kalea, etc.
To go into the matter, barley receives the scientific name of “Hordeum vulgare”, belonging to the grass family (Poaceae), so it is a cereal like wheat, rice, corn, etc. It’s a very important crop in Spanish agriculture since it is one of the most planted along with wheat, corn and rice… in our area (Cuenca) it is the most sown cereal with a lot of difference compared to the second.
Basically, we have three kinds of barley and within each of them, the farmer has many varieties from which to choose the most suitable. These classes would be:
- Two-row barley or malting barley (Hordeum distichon): It is one that after maturing the spike, only the central spikelet remains. It is called malting barley because it is the most used in the beer industry because the barley grains are larger and have greater uniformity in size. In addition, they present great regularity in germination, low protein level and high diastatic power (it is the measure of the activity of malt enzymes to break down complex carbohydrates into reduced sugars).
- Six-row barley or horse barley (Hordeum hexastichon): It maintains the three spikelets in such a way that it has three grains per node of the rachis.
- Four-row barley (Hordeum tetrastichon): The two lateral spikelets are maintained and only have two grains per node of the rachis. They are currently the least common.
As for varieties, in recent years a multitude of them have been made available to the farmer, which we will name and analyze below. In our case, one of the reference centers is the Albaladejito Agroforestry Research Center (CIAF)which has been supporting farmers since the 1960s in terms of agricultural training, research, experimentation and technology transfer, as well as various services of interest in seed studies, subscribers, etc.
As we have mentioned, the Hispanic variety has been our favorite so far, but in recent years it has been surpassed in yield by many other varieties, in our case Nure and Sfera. It is true that depending on the area, varieties can have very different yieldsas we can see in the following studies carried out in Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León:
And if we see the CIAF results in a different area such as Cuencawhere the soil is different (sandy-loam texture) and the rainfall is also less (from September 2019 to July 2020 there was a precipitation of 509.9 mm distributed mainly between autumn and spring) we see quite different results.
Therefore, we can conclude that the Yields depend to a large extent on agronomic conditions, confirming that the varieties to be planted can vary according to the area. and noting that the results of one and the other are relevant within the same area.
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