Breeding the best is the best option

Recent research has shown that, for every pound spent in this country on plant breeding, up to £40 is generated in the wider UK economy and, according to Nigel Kerby, who heads Mylnefield Research Services (MRS), investment in plant breeding is critical for any country with ambitions for its agriculture.

However, Kerby, who was addressing a growers’ meeting in Dundee, doubted whether the UK now had the plant breeding capacity to make the maximum use of improving plant varieties. “It is really hard to find people with experience in plant breeding,” he said.

He believed that, while the government was waking up to the importance of food security – where plant breeding had a major role to play in increasing yields and reducing costs through resistance to disease and improved efficiency in nutrient uptake – they might not be able to maximise output.

He said plant breeding was by far the most likely method of increasing food production, with other possibilities such as increasing the area of land under cropping having limited potential.

MRS markets the cultivars coming out of the former Scottish Crop Research Institute, now the James Hutton Institute, and the latest advances in raspberry breeding were highlighted by breeder Nikki Jennings.

Gene sequencing was being used to bring forward new cultivars with resistance to one of the most troublesome diseases to attack raspberries – root rot.

She said that, with the shortened breeding timescale gained by this technology, the first new cultivars with resistance would be starting fruiting trials this year. Other traits, such as increasing fruit size, were now being looked at and could be combined with the root rot resistance, she said.

Growers also heard of problems with both peat and coir, the main materials used in the growing of soft fruit in polytunnels.

Neil Bragg, of Bulrush, who supply these materials to growers, said the supply of coir – the husk of coconuts – was now very much a hand-to-mouth situation. The main supply comes from India but whereas there used to be heaps of this waste product 20 years ago, these stocks had now all gone.

He was also concerned that China would increasingly muscle in on the market and, with transport costs much less than shipping it to the UK, this country would lose out.

Bragg was also critical of the stance taken by some of the major supermarkets who objected to growers using peat as the growing medium because it was “not sustainable”.

He pointed out that Ireland harvests some 60 million cubic metres of peat annually and only one-fifth goes to horticulture, the rest heading for Irish power generating plants, “and we hear no objection to that usage”.