Agriculture

The Centre for Sustainable Cropping (CSC) is a long-term experimental platform established to integrate all aspects of sustainability research on arable ecosystems. The CSC allows us to study crop management at a more integrated and system wide level and compare this to conventional crop husbandry practices. We have been using the CSC platform to study the impact of sustainable soil management practices on soil-borne pathogens. Here, we focus on the detection, quantification and impact of Rhizotonia solani: specifically, the sub-group known as R. solani AG3.

Improving the management of Scotland’s natural assets at a landscape-level for ecological, economic, and social outcomes is a priority for the Scottish Government and its partners. Adaptive management is one way to achieve this objective and is about connecting the ‘doing’ of natural resource management with ‘learning’ about the context of the management situation, and the responses and effects of the management actions. We provide a series of lessons learned from five studies that cover a range of landscape-level management situations, including upland and lowland areas.

Potato is the number one wasted household food by weight, estimated at over 700,000 tonnes and with a cost of £555M per annum in the UK. Nearly half of the fresh potatoes bought by UK householders are thrown away. Working with collaborators from industry and academia we have investigated ways to improve potato storage to minimise waste.

Electronic identification (EID) tags have been compulsory in UK sheep flocks since 2010, and a decade after their introduction, can still be a controversial topic. But these tags, rather than just identifying individual animals, also offer a huge opportunity to improve efficiency and productivity on-farm; allowing a greater understanding of production rates on the farm, and perhaps even in particular fields, providing an early warning of potential problems.

Farming practices are evolving in response to intensification, diversification and climate change. As farm management has changed, pathogens of livestock have also adapted to optimise their reproduction and transmission opportunities. Our work, supported by Animal and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB), has focused on the control and biology of the economically important roundworm Nematodirus battus; a gut roundworm which annually threatens the health and welfare of young lambs across the UK. Our research has explored how Nematodirus behaves on commercial sheep farms.