The report of the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures (GFFF) Group was released in January 2011, and I attended a One Year On meeting of its ‘High Level Stakeholder Group’ that looked  at the already considerable impacts it has had on both thinking and action (not least that of BBSRC). One of these is the appointment of a Food Security Champion, Professor Tim Benton, with whom I also had a useful catch-up on the very many activities that are going on in the Food Security space.

Food and agriculture, as well as Industrial Biotechnology, also figured largely in a meeting I had with Mary Creagh, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. Brazil is, of course, an agricultural superpower, and we had a very useful meeting with Professors Glaucius Oliva (Head of the CNPq funding agency) and João Carlos Teatini (Head of the CAPES agency, that mainly looks after graduate education). We already have many excellent links with Brazil, including a LabEx (laboratory exchange) scheme with the Agricultural Research agency Embrapa (and whose Head I also saw at the GFFF meeting); we now anticipate strengthening these further. [...]

As well as a variety of internal meetings, I attended a couple of receptions, the first of which was at BIS – largely for industrialists and partner organisations. This was very useful, and I met a number of folk who would not normally see themselves as close to our interests. The second was an annual event (though a first for me) where ‘scientists meet the media’ at the Royal Society. Again I made a number of potentially important contacts that will help get the BBSRC message out.

The main visit of the week was to Harper Adams University College. Harper Adams is a major provider of agricultural education, training and knowledge transfer, as well as (largely applied) research. This was thus an exceptionally interesting visit. Without seeking to pick out specific areas, I note that Harper Adams runs the only UK degree courses in Agricultural Engineering, and I saw some very interesting work at the interface of engineering and agriculture, especially in the areas of using modern technology to plant, sense, weed, and harvest agricultural crops. The whole area of ‘precision agriculture’ is going to provide an important contribution to increasing the productivity of food and non-food crops, and we can expect it to expand significantly. [...]

Welcome back to all from the winter break, to the first blog of 2012!

As last year, I attended part of the Oxford Farming Conference, where I enjoyed many excellent talks, such as one from USDA Chief Economist Joe Glauber highlighting the economic benefits to be had from investment in agricultural R&D and another from the newly knighted Defra Chief Scientist Sir Bob Watson. In informal conversation I also discovered the existence (from a young OFC Scholar) of the Miscanthus Growers Group. There is no doubt that improved and sustainable agricultural productivity is very much back on the scientific and agricultural agenda. [...]

Apart from a considerable amount of shortlisting and interviewing for various posts, my first main visit of the week was to Rothamsted Research, which bills itself as “the largest agricultural research centre in the United Kingdom and almost certainly the oldest agricultural research station in the world”, starting from its time as the Rothamsted Experimental Station. I was shown a great many exciting areas of science, from food and non-food crop improvements including novel means for water, carbon and nutrient sequestration in plant roots, through metagenomics and farm platform technology. Rothamsted is anticipated to be a major player in our delivery of improved crops for global food security.

We also had a very useful meeting with the Office for Life Sciences, concentrating in particular on our strategies for industrial biotechnology and bioenergy as part of the Knowledge-Based BioEconomy. [...]

After my holidays, my first visit was to the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB-TAG), where I enjoyed seeing the many recent developments in all phases of the ‘pipeline’ from some comparatively basic research on optimizing genetic transformation in wheat to some very applied work involving varietal testing and an innovation farm showcasing various activities. As the UK’s largest grain crop, wheat is an important target (including for genomics-driven breeding), and NIAB was studying a great many varieties.

Not least since the paper of Meuwissen and colleagues in 2001, it has been recognized that breeding strategies are likely to work better when one has knowledge of as much as possible of the genotype as well as of the phenotype, although the difficulty lies more in the optimization of the genotype-phenotype mapping. Genome sequences continue to be released apace (e.g. that for an apple variety), and the opportunities afforded by the upcoming genome sequencing of wheat – see last week’s blog – are truly enormous. [...]