An industry-wide consortium, led by producer organisation G’s Growers and involving the Crop Science Centre, has won a UKRI-BBSRC collaborative training partnership award (CTP) to provide a £3.6 million postgraduate training programme in sustainable agricultural innovation.

The CTP programme for Sustainable Agricultural Innovation (CTP-SAI) will ensure young scientists are ‘business aware’, opening up opportunities for careers across industry. Running from 2022 to 2028, the CTP-SAI will create a pre-competitive network in which businesses can explore and co-design research and innovation programmes and will train 30 PhD students. 

 Ensuring the programme is inclusive and recruits a diverse range of candidates into agriculture is a priority. The CTP-SAI aims to lead the sector by example, training the next generation of new thinkers, ready to act in the public and private sector to effect positive global change in the food and farming system. The programme is supported by leading UK and international agri-food businesses, research organisations and charitable organisations representing the collective needs of farmers and practitioners.

 Dr Richard Harrison, NIAB’s Director of Cambridge Crop Research, says, “This CTP stretches across the food and farming crop supply chain, bringing together partners to address the joint challenges of reducing emissions, developing resilient farming systems and reversing biodiversity decline. Our vision is to train new thinkers for new times, providing outstanding training to address the challenges of creating and delivering sustainable agricultural systems.”

 Emma Garfield, Head of Research Agronomy at G’s Growers Ltd, says: “Businesses need access to postgraduates with skills in research and innovation in order to adapt to the enormous challenges that climate change, land use change and biodiversity loss pose. We also need to ensure that the supply chain products and processes pass the test of responsible, sustainable innovation that is core to each businesses value set and corporate social responsibilities.”

 Ms Garfield explains that the CTP programme places science-led innovation at its heart to ensure field-based agriculture is equipped with tools to enable resilient, sustainable and economic crop production whilst meeting consumer demands. The programme will address both short-term bioscience research challenges to facilitate the delivery of solutions within the next decade as well as thinking longer-term about the wider systems changes that will be underpinned by the research that this cohort of students will undertake.

 “A set of bespoke underpinning training modules have been developed in data science and machine learning, entrepreneurship and systems thinking in a global food security context, which will provide stimulating, thought-provoking skills-based training opportunities in some of the key areas that, regardless of scientific specialism, the leaders of today and tomorrow require,” says Dr Harrison.

 “This integrated programme, the first of its kind, will ensure that regardless of the future career path CTP students choose, they will have a thorough understanding of how businesses work and how, as scientists, to positively engage in bringing science-led solutions to market,” finishes Ms Garfield.

 The programme has been co-developed with NIAB as part of its alliance with the University of Cambridge, the Crop Science Centre, the James Hutton Institute and leading UK universities.

It has been a year to the day since the Crop Science Centre launched with the aim of improving resilience and equity of productivity in global agriculture. Professor Giles Oldroyd FRS, Russell R. Geiger Professor of Crop Science at the University of Cambridge and Inaugural Director of the Crop Science Centre, reflects on a remarkable year:

"Since then [launch], the centre has changed dramatically from an empty building with a team of four people working remotely attempting to make the space operational, to a thriving and diverse working environment with 49 members of students and staff. We have also had six students working with us over the summer and we even have our first faculty member spending a sabbatical with us.

For me, one of the highlights of the year was welcoming three new Crop Science Centre research fellows and one Royal Society Research fellow. I am thrilled to be supporting young scientists to develop their research careers in crop sciences. These appointments have brought focus to our research areas, with research groups working on Sustainable Crop Nutrition, Cereal Symbioses, Crop-Parasite Interactions, Crop Immunity and Crop Breeding Technologies.

Despite the efforts getting operational at a time of significant restrictions on access to the laboratories, we have still managed to progress our science and impact agenda. In particular our first field work and establishing our new glasshouses with speed breeding capability, that massively increases the pace of crop genetics. We also have a number of publications on our science that you can read about further on this website.

We are currently busy working on new infrastructure for bioimaging and crop transformation, new opportunities for training in crop sciences at masters and PhD level and working on our first GM field trials that we hope to have in the ground by next year.

When I look back at where we were a year ago today I am amazed at how much we have achieved and I am excited about the impact we can have on making sure that everyone on this planet has access to affordable food, grown in the most sustainable manner."

This August will see the first trial harvest at the Crop Science Centre. Writing ahead of this harvest, Crop Science Centre Scientist, and harvest co-ordinator, Tom Thirkell said:

“We are excited to have planted our first ENSA field trial here at the Crop Science Centre, a collaboration between NIAB and the University of Cambridge. In this trial, we are testing the effect of mycorrhizal fungi inoculants on the performance of four cultivars of spring malting barley - LG Diablo, RGT Planet, Laureate and Golden Promise. We will soon harvest the trial and assess the impact of the mycorrhizas on crop yield and grain nutrient contents.

Most of our crop plants in the UK already grow in symbiosis with naturally occurring mycorrhizal fungi, but many practices in modern agriculture such as tillage and fertiliser application can harm the formation and function of these interactions. As a result, the benefit received by the plants from mycorrhizas can be low or even zero. In this barley trial, we are taking the first steps to investigate how mycorrhizas form in the field, and how we might develop new crops which establish strong, positive interactions with mycorrhizal fungi.”

At the Crop Science Centre, we are searching for innovative ways to improve the sustainability of farming systems globally. Efficient nutrient uptake by crops is still a major challenge across the world, and sustainably improving crop nutrition is a major focus of our work. In higher-income countries, the over-use of fertilisers often causes environmental damage, while in lower-income countries, crop yields are limited because fertilisers are unaffordable or unavailable to many farmers. It is increasingly clear that to achieve global food security, future crops must be less reliant on synthetic fertilisers.

Blog Update, The day of the harvest - September 9 2020

The trial barley crops have now been successfully harvested from Park Farm by a team from NIAB, including Sue Mann (photographed above). The trial had four cultivars of barley, and each of these either had a mycorrhizal inoculum added when the seeds were sown, or they were sown without the inoculum, so there were eight treatment groups. Each of these groups was then replicated six times, so there were 48 trials plots in total. The plots were 2m wide x 9m long  (as can be seen on the photo to the right).

Writing shortly after the harvest was complete, Tom Thirkell said:

"After a damp start the sky cleared, and some afternoon sun dried the trial enough for the harvester to go out. I am really pleased with the way the harvest went, and the trial in general - NIAB have been great to work with on this project. I am looking forward to working through the data from our first field trial at the Crop Science Centre and seeing what effects the mycorrhizal inoculation had on these barley cultivars. As well as getting yield data from these plots, we are sending samples for further analysis which will give us details on the nutritional and malting quality of our barley crop."

Blog Update, Post-harvest field trial analysis- February 2022

Analysis of the Crop Science Centre’s first field trials has provided confidence in the use of the barley cultivar Golden Promise for future field trials, as well as the presence of mycorrhizal fungi in the soil at Park Farm trial site. These findings are significant since our upcoming field trials will be investigating the impact of AM fungi on GM Golden Promise at Park Farm.

Field trials co-ordinator, Tom Thirkell, said “The Golden Promise barley cultivar is the background genotype of our genetic work so we were especially interested in testing its establishment and growth performance.

We found that, despite being around half a century older than the other barley cultivars we tested, Golden Promise established and yielded well in the field trial.”

The post-harvest analysis also revealed that barley grain yield was unaffected by mycorrhizal fungal inoculation, as was the nutritional content.

Roots from all trial plots showed mycorrhizal fungal colonisation, suggesting a significant quantity of mycorrhizal fungal propagules in the soil at the Park Farm trials site. Fungal DNA sequencing and community analysis will show the identities of the fungal species that colonized the barley roots, and how this differs among cultivars and with inoculation treatments.

Tom continued “From this trial, we can’t tell if the plants benefit from the fungi because there are fungi in the soil already, so even in the plots that received no fungi inoculum, the plants still got colonised. This is where the next set of barley field trials will be really informative, because we'll have barley that can’t form mycorrhizal fungi associations. When we compare barley with a symbiotic relationship with fungi to those without, this will show us what impact, if any, the mycorrhizas fungi are having."