Official oilseed rape trials in Scotland have suffered a devastating blow with the abandonment of four major sites due to poor establishment and bad weather this winter.

Recommended List trials sites at Kinross and Laurencekirk and Scotland’s only two National List sites at Arbroath and Kinross have had to be written off. HGCA’s RL manager Jim McVittie warned there would be a delay in the uptake of new varieties and the industry would be set back a year.

“We are talking to plant breeders now in advance of our OSR Crop Committee meeting next month to see what we can salvage,” he said. “We need to decide how to move forward but whatever we do will not be ideal.”

The crisis has highlighted the problem for Scottish growers of relying on a reduced number of sites following the Scottish Government’s decision to pull out of funding an extra trial.

Scottish Agronomy runs an 8ha site at Kinross, trialling 33 varieties for the RL and 146 for the NL. All the second-year NL trials have been lost. The crops were sown a month late because of difficult weather, and water rotted poorly established plants. Trials manager Adam Christie said it was the first time Scottish Agronomy had suffered such a catastrophic failure, and it was now impossible to give meaningful information for the next sowing season.

“This is a nightmare because Scotland is already on a knife-edge in terms of being able to produce enough data. We only have enough trials if they all make it,” he said.

Poor weather also wiped out SAC’s RL trials at Laurencekirk. Oilseed specialist Elaine Booth confirmed an entire year’s data had been lost. She added: “This demonstrates the high-risk strategy of cutting back on sites.”