High yielding winter feed wheat with excellent disease resistance.
SY Defiant is a high yielding feed wheat, bred by Syngenta in the UK and developed in New Zealand in conjunction with Cropmark seeds as head licensee. It has high yield potential and has performed well in irrigated and dryland sites.
SY Defiant is a short variety with excellent straw strength and is early maturing. It has excellent disease resistance.
Testimonial:
“We switched to SY Defiant last year after growing another top-performing variety of wheat for several years.
The crop was planted early June and looked great all the way through to harvest. It had three applications of fungicide, but never showed signs of high disease pressure . Harvested in early February and I was very happy with the yield and grain quality.
Will grow again this year.”
James Thomas, Longbeach Estate (harvested 2025)
Graph 1. Average wheat yields from 2023/24 FAR Cultivar Evaluation. FAR Autumn sown wheat and barley booklet 2023/2024.
Presented as a % of trial means – site mean yield for Canterbury was 12.2 t/ha and Southland was 10.8 t/ha.
SY Defiant has an excellent disease resistance profile with trials showing a low response to fungicide use. This makes it a low cost, low risk variety to grow along with low sprouting risk and early maturing. It can be sown from late March through to mid-July.
Ideal plant populations are March – April 150 plants/m2, May-June 175 plants/m2.
SY Defiant is a short stiff straw variety and will only need PGRs in high fertility, high yielding environments.
Disease and agronomic profile (FAR booklet 2023/2024)
"*" indicates required fields
