Naked barley grown in Lincolshire (for the first time since the Iron Age?)

To have any chance of being a successful crop in the UK and delivering the public health benefits that it promises, naked barley needs to perform on the farm, not just in trial plots.  While I was at Bangor University we tried farm trials of the naked varieties Taiga and Lawina, both of which only yielded around 3 t/ha on farm, only half of a covered spring barley, and less than the 4-5 t/ha they achieved in plot trials.

This year for the first time I had enough seed of my crosses to sow a 0.7 ha (1.75 acre) plot on my parents' farm in Lincolnshire.  I bulked together seed from nine crosses including Lawina, an ICARDA variety from Syria, and a Tibetan landrace as sources of the naked trait; and seven UK covered varieties, as sources of UK adaptation, agronomic traits and disease resistance.  The practical reason was that I didn't have enough seed of any one cross; the other advantage of this diversity was to generate a population in a similar manner to Martin Wolfe's pioneering work at Wakelyns and Elm Farm.

The trial was drilled on 8 March and established well, although the seed rate was low as we were trying to make the limited seed cover as large an area as possible, which caused a problem later.

Setting up a commercial combine ( our 25 year old MF 34) for naked barley was the next challenge.  We found that two factors were important to reduce the number of broken grains: first to slow the drum speed from the usual 1000 rpm for covered barley to 800; secondly to make sure the concave was full at all times to cushion the grain as it was being threshed.

We did a trial run along the edge but were breaking too many grains because not enough material was going through the concave to cushion the grains. Taking a full width cut and keeping speed up improved the sample greatly.

The important results are yield and quality: Yield was over 5 t/ha for the mix and 6 t/ha for a strip from a single cross, proving that viable yields can be achieved on farm with conventional mangement.  

Quality was good except for broken grains (solved by slowing drum and ensuring a full concave), fragments of ear (which could be removed by a grain cleaner) and green grains from secondary tillers due to the lower than optimum plant population.  Grains were bold and bright with an impressive specific weight (bushel weight) of >79 kg/hl (vs. 65-70 for covered barley).

So, the first naked barley crop in Lincolnshire, possibly since prehistoric times, has shown that this ancient grain has the yield and quality to be viable once again.