New (open-access) paper! I tried to figure out how to talk about pod-set in faba bean properly. Key takeaway: Interactions between pods are agronomically irrelevant except after stress that kills flowers/pods. Focus on crop growth from flowering! doi.org/10.1093/jxb/eraf176

One for the trial perfectionists! Precision planting without a small-plot precision seeder 🤤 Phillip Porter at Livyn Seeds can (very affordably) place your seeds in dissolvable tape at the desired spacing. livynseed.com.au/

Hey look what I found on Kangaroo Island

We love the jacarandas in Adelaide. I love the opportunity to show how nearly all flowering plants overproduce and cull flowers, not just faba bean 😉🤓

A (1/2): If faba bean was a pavlova, then new varieties are cut into bigger slices (bigger seeds, if you ignore the broadbeans), stand up better (lodging resistance) and don't go mouldy (disease resistance). That's a better pavlova! And it was improved on a limited budget! 1/2

If you're a researcher who may not care about fabas all that much, you might be interested in Fig 7, where we make some comparisons to other crops.

If you're an Australian agronomist/grower, you might be particularly interested to see the yield results from 77 Australian experiments in Fig 5. Note the bigger penalties of going below 20pl/m2 AND the large site-to-site variability. There's just a lot of ExM for this M.

505 pods from 4 plants sown at ~2plm2 is 125 pods per plant ~250pods per m2. Not bad. 15 pods per plant at 25plm2 is 375 pods per m2. Yield comes from a paddock not a plant. My main reason for posting is that the person who wrote this protocol (me) is awful and I don't like them

Final visit before trial harvest near Kapunda SA on a heavier black soil. No rain since early August and a hot September, but doing okay on stored moisture

Necking scored after some strong wind at Kapunda in 1.2m thirsty faba beans. Broadbeans (aquadulce, right) worse than normal fabas (Samara, left). This trial has all Aussie cultivars so we can measure progress for this trait @SC_Catt @JasonBrand