Determining Best-performing Crop Cultivars
UGA's Statewide Variety Testing Program evaluates current and new cultivars of agronomic crops for performance under Georgia growing conditions. The Statewide Variety Testing program (SWVT) evaluated 704 experimental and released crop varieties from July 2019 to June 2020, including peanut (48), cotton (85), corn (87), soybean (103), sorghum (123), millet (8), canola (29), ryegrass (48), barley (5), oats (37), triticale (8), rye (11), and wheat (103). Tests included the harvest of grain, lint, pods, forage and/or silage, depending on the species. Depending on the crop, varieties were tested in one to nine environments to confirm their adaptation to Georgia growing conditions. This allowed top-yielding varieties to be identified and other characteristics to be described. In forage and silage tests, they saw yield advantages of 6 to 22 percent for the top performer compared to the average of varieties tested. Row crops showed even larger differences, ranging from 6 to 38 percent. With the tight profit margins that farmers face, proper variety selection can be the difference between profit and loss.
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