Commercial quantities of Brighton may be available through AGT Affiliates, or your local retailer.
Brighton is able to be traded between growers upon the completion of a License Agreement as part of AGT’s Seed Sharing™ initiative.
Brighton is protected by Plant Breeders Rights (PBR) and all production (except seed saved for planting) is liable to an End Point Royalty (EPR), which funds future plant breeding.
Brighton growers will be subject to a Growers License Agreement that acknowledges that an EPR of $4.1/tonne + GST has to be paid on all production other than seed saved for planting.
Breeders comments
Dual purpose, graze and grain wheat varieties have traditionally been very valuable to mixed farmers, providing more than one opportunity to generate income throughout the season. The use of dual purpose varieties has continued to gain in popularity, perhaps due to a shift in earlier sowing of grain-only crops.
We started a winter wheat breeding program at Wagga Wagga in 2014 in acknowledgement of the need for better performing long season and dual purpose varieties, with Illabo being a popular release from this program. Illabo has been a success story, offering mixed farmers a large step up in performance over the mainstay variety EGA Wedgetail.
Our newest variety in this space, Brighton, is poised to offer even more advancements in productivity, offering improvements in yield and physical grain quality over Illabo.
Brighton also offers improved yellow leaf spot resistance over Illabo, however is more susceptible to powdery mildew and septoria tritici blotch.
Brighton is a quick-mid maturing winter wheat, reaching head emergence slightly faster than Illabo across a range of sowing dates.
Brighton is derived from popular main season wheat variety Beckom, and has inherited Beckom’s shorter plant height and aluminium (acid soils) tolerance genes. Like Beckom and many other varieties, Brighton may express physiological leaf yellowing throughout winter; however will grow out of these symptoms in spring.
To maximise grain only yield, Brighton appears ideally suited to mid-late April sowing in high yield environments, and mid April in lower yielding environments. To maximise the length of safe grazing time, Brighton may be sown from mid March through to mid April.