Emblaze
Kale
- High yielding, short to medium height kale
- Excellent stem softness to promote crop utilisation and good stem quality to enhance animal performance
- Improved disease tolerance compared to Kestrel kale
- Versatility to be used as an autumn feed option
- First and second crop option
Emblaze is an all-round kale, which replaces Kestrel kale, a cultivar that has a long and proud history of delivering consistent performance throughout the kale growing regions in New Zealand.
Retaining and enhancing the many attributes of Kestrel is what characterises Emblaze. High leaf ratio and soft stems, means it can be used for all stock classes including young sheep, cattle and deer. Improvements in yield, disease tolerance and later flowering means the versatility of Emblaze extends beyond traditional Kestrel areas and offers the opportunity to fit into many areas where medium height kales are often used during the autumn to add grazing flexibility when feed can become limiting.
Dry matter production
Across trials conducted over multiple years and locations in Canterbury and Southland, Emblaze and Kestrel showed no significant differences in total dry matter yield (tDM/ha). Emblaze consistently delivers a higher proportion of leaf relative to stem compared with Kestrel, resulting in improved feed quality and greater utilisation. This enhanced leaf-to-stem ratio is a key advantage for short- to medium-type kales, where quality and efficiency are critical.
STEM SOFTNESS
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges in plant breeding is to develop a kale that has a softer stem than Kestrel, a characteristic for which it is renowned for. Soft stems are associated with greater utilisation of the crop when feeding to livestock. To quantify the differences in cultivar stem hardness an Instron machine was used to measure the force it takes to penetrate the outer stem at two points, a quarter and halfway down the stem. The results show that Emblaze has a similar, if not slightly higher, stem softness to Kestrel.
