Dormancy Problem With Oats

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31926, 1 March 1969, Page 10

Dormancy Problem With Oats

Farmers who want to sow oats to provide extra feed before the middle of April should not use Amuri oats because they may be slow in establishing on account of postharvest dormancy.

According to Mr G. M. Wright, plant breeder at the Crop Research Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research at Lincoln, slow germination or establishment had occurred in North Otago last season where Aniuri oats were sown in February, about a month after harvesting, with the aim of providing early autumn grazing. There had, however, been no reports of this happening in Canterbury.

This- was caused by post harvest dormancy which had not been suspected in a white oat, Mr Wright said.

The Department of Agriculture’s seed testing station in Palmerston North had been advised of this last year and had offered to carry out more

complete testing of future samples of the oats to ascertain whether the problem was more widespread. The station normally prechilled oat samples to remove any slight dormancy and give a more reliable germination figure. This season the station was testing unchilled grain as well and so far they had tested seven samples from the current season’s harvest, including five from the Christchurch district, one from North Canterbury and one from Marlborough. The average germination of the unchilled oats had been 20 per cent, whereas with the pre-chilled samples the result had been 97 per cent. -Mr Wright said that merchants had been advised last season of the possibility of this occurring but because pre-harvest weather in Canterbury was normally warmer than in North Otago it was thought that it was possible that the problem would not be as severe here as it had appeared to be in North Otago last season. However, this summer had not been particularly warm and farmers were therefore advised that new season’s Amuri oats, if sown within the next month or two, would probably be slow to appear. The dormancy was not as strong as formally found in Algerian eats but it was not known how long it would last. The seed testing station, he said, would be retesting samples of Amuri until the dormancy disappeared so that they would • know how long this condition persisted. Farmers could be sure that when the soil became cooler the oats would come away well. In North Otago one line of Amuri oats, which was much slower to establish than

Winter Grey oats sown alongside them, produced much more feed by mid-April—it : had by that time caught up with and gone well ahead of

the Winter Greys, but if a farmer wanted oats for feeding before mid-April new season’s Amuri would not be suitable.