Contact: James Holden, 0408 669 026
February 3, 2009
Pioneer Technology Show looks to the future
The future of summer cropping will be on display later this month at Pioneer Hi-Bred Australia’s second technology show to be held at Pioneer’s research complex at Wyreema near Toowoomba.
Craig Choice, Pioneer’s corn and sorghum product manager, said over 400 summer cropping personnel attended the inaugural technology show in February 2007 and he had received many requests from growers and advisors for Pioneer to conduct a second show.
Mr Choice said the focus of this year’s show, which will be running each day from Tuesday February 24 to Thursday February 26, will be on Pioneer’s new generation of hybrids and associated summer cropping technologies to benefit farmers.”
“The results of the restructure of our grain sorghum breeding program are now making it through to commercial reality,” Mr Choice said.
“Things are now different at Pioneer with regards to grain sorghum.
"In fact, we have completely replaced our grain sorghum line-up over the past two seasons with exciting new products.”
He said all the new hybrids, including G56, G08 and G99, which is being released in 2009, provide harvestable yield as a result of increased focus on development of defensive traits.
“Our sorghum breeder, Ivan Calvert, has managed to combine consistently high yield with outstanding staygreen and lodging resistance.”
Mr Choice said growers could also inspect the new processing corn hybrid, 32P55. He said this exciting new hybrid out-yields current processing hybrids by at least 10 percent.
“We also have a new corn hybrid, P2375, that has an exceptional disease-resistance package making it ideal for coastal and tropical environments.”
He said, “We want this show to assist growers and advisors in making good decisions about which summer crops and hybrids to plant and also to demonstrate how to get the best out their crops.
“For instance we’ll have demonstrations on planting techniques to ensure optimum plant populations plus standability and spray-out trials.”
This year’s sponsors of the Pioneer Technology Show are DuPont (crop protection), Bayer CropScience (seed treatments), Vanderfield (latest machinery), Yara Nipro (plant nutrition), Pursehouse Rural (seed placement technology), Penford Australia (grain end use), Lachlan Commodities (marketing options).
Mr Choice said there will be two tours on each day. The first tour will start at 9.00 am and the afternoon tour starts at 1.30 pm. Admission is free and lunch will also be provided free of charge for everyone attending the show.
Mr Choice said, “We are hopeful that once again a large proportion of the summer cropping industries’ personnel will attend the Pioneer Technology Show and we are confident that they will all get something worthwhile out of it.”
ENDS