News article

Three new varieties have been added to the 2010 BBRO/NIAB Recommended List of Sugar Beet Varieties.  This is fewer than recent years and with withdrawals means there are now 17 varieties to choose from.

NIAB has announced the appointment to the NIAB Trust of Cambridgeshire-based grower John Shropshire.  Mr Shropshire heads up the family farming company G’s Marketing Limited, based at Barway, near Ely, which supplies salad crops and field vegetables from 25 co-operative farms covering 15,000 acres in the UK and 10,000 acres in Spain.

Dr Tina Barsby, chief executive of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge, has welcomed the call from Professor John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, for significant investment in scientific research to meet the world’s future food needs.  

Budding scientists, young and old, are invited to become a pathologist for the day as part of National Science Week – not with humans or animals, but with agricultural crops.

Latest results from NIAB’s Labtest service suggest that while Potato Leaf Roll Virus (PLRV) is largely absent this year, a quarter of farm-saved seed potatoes destined for the 2009 crop have been infected at some level with Potato Virus Y (PVY), one of the most serious potato viruses affecting crop yields and tuber quality.

David Baulcombe, Royal Society Research Professor and Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, has joined the Board of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB).

The National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) is to repeat its two-week intensive training course in ‘Quantitative Genetics in Plant Breeding’, after the first session held earlier this year was heavily over-subscribed.

Targeted at both existing and prospective plant breeders, the post-graduate level course aims to update practitioners on the role and application of statistical and quantitative genetics in practical plant breeding programmes.

Hundreds of visitors to Ely Cathedral were able to learn first hand how innovative scientists at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany are researching new crops.

They were invited by the eastern region’s NFU to participate in the cathedral’s harvest festival on 11 and 12 October with the underlying theme Farming Past, Present and Future.

The challenge for 21st century agriculture is to double food production over the next 40 years, on a finite amount of land and using increasingly scarce and costly resources.