Way forward for arable lies with
growing energy crops
A FARMER in the Westcountry just a generation ago would have been astonished at the turn-around of British agriculture that has been achieved in just three decades.
Used to subsidies and marketing boards, the need to produce more food and with it all the assurance of a fairly-easily calculated profit-and-loss account, he or she would be amazed at how farming has changed.
Now the emphasis, increasingly, is on producing crops for energy, either as a main product, or a bi-product of crops grown principally for other ueses.
In a world fast expending its fossil fuel reserves, alternative sources will be needed more and more – preferably clean fuel, and above all, renewable.
Wind, tides and the sun’s rays will help power the world of the future, but so, too, will the farmers’ efforts in growing non-food crops for biofuel and recycling agricultural waste as an alternative energy source.
If British industry has been tardy in developing biofuel refineries it is thanks to the huge leaps that have taken place in the past very few years in advances in technology. No one wants to commit to constructing a costly plant if it is to become obsolete after only a few years.
But all is changing. The country’s primary public funder of bioscience research has announced over £13 million of research projects to turn ideas from excellent basic plant science into practical applications to benefit the nation’s farmers and consumers.
With the challenges to agriculture posed by climate change and an increasing need to grow and farm in sustainable ways, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has awarded funding to 18 projects that will aim to address real-world issues. New research will exploit the world-class basic plant science and plant genetics in the UK to improve the sustainability of agriculture and look at problems, including:
*How to grow crops able to cope with climate change
*How to breed vegetables that remain nutritious after days in the fridge
*How to grow more effective biofuels to help reduce the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels.
*How to exploit plants more effectively to produce better bread, beer, biodegradable carrier bags and lots of other applications.
Professor Julia Goodfellow, BBSRC chief executive, said: "The UK is home to some of the best plant science in the world. We want to harness this and exploit it to address some of the pressing issues that we face.
"BBSRC’s aim is to support basic crop research that will produce results to make farming more sustainable and able to meet the challenges of a changing environment."
The BBSRC Crop Science Initiative follows an earlier review of the council’s support for crop science, which found that UK crop research needed to better translate basic plant science into new crop varieties to help growers, industry and consumers. The new projects are intended to help do this.
Eleven research establishments are involved – the Universities of Warwick, Durham, York, Leeds, and East Anglia, the John Innes Centre at Norwich, Rothamsted Research Institute in Hertfordshire, East Malling Research Institute in Kent, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) at Cambridge, and the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) at Aberystwyth.
