How the RL will deliver for industry (five-year strategy)

Paul Gosling, who leads the RL project at AHDB, explains how a new strategy will focus the cereals and oilseeds variety trialling project over the next five years.

The overall aim of the Recommended Lists (RL) is to ensure a successful route to market for new cereal and oilseed varieties with appropriate agronomic and quality characteristics.

We want the RL to feature varieties that help all businesses – from farmers to end users – maintain and improve the productivity and competitiveness of the UK grain supply chain. However, RL users are diverse, the production environment is changing, and the budget is limited.

Faced with competing demands, it is important to have a focused plan of action. This is why the RL board has recently signed off on a delivery strategy, to help us meet the most pressing needs of users of the RL over the next five years and beyond.

It will come as no surprise that yield remains an important element, with its close link to profitability. Yield is also a robust proxy for resource use efficiency – an increasingly important priority.

As input costs have risen and pesticides have been withdrawn, growers need genetic solutions more and more. The RL will continue to enhance its offer in this area. It will also consider the challenges posed by climate change, sustainability and net zero.

The RL delivery strategy describes the challenges, and our plan to tackle them, within four themes:

To counter the increasing pressures on farm business profitability, the RL will help farmers reduce input costs. To lessen the need for plant protection products, the RL will continue to focus on IPM (see point 2). In addition, we will seek ways to work with farmers (including monitor farmers and strategic farmers) to identify varieties that perform well in reduced tillage and regenerative systems – which in turn will help them secure payments for public goods.

Financial success also requires market specifications to be met, so that any premiums can be realised. We will continue to work closely with millers and maltsters to ensure varieties meet supply-chain requirements. This includes the introduction of quality traits, though specialist categories, for instance.

The RL supports the adoption of IPM by recommending varieties with improved pest and disease resistance, even if their yield is not the highest. The introduction of traits (such as BYDV tolerance/resistance in wheat and barley, and clubroot resistance in oilseed rape) is facilitated by specialist categories and acceptance of breeders’ claims for traits, where the evidence supports this. The RL expects to use such approaches more in the future.

We will also work with our research and knowledge exchange teams to better understand how to deploy resistance in the field and to identify where variety selection can help manage intractable problems, such as cabbage stem flea beetle.

Environmental sustainability and the drive towards net zero increasingly influence farm management and the choices made by maltsters, millers and their customers. With its focus on yield and resistance, the RL drives better resource-use efficiency. The RL will also work with research partners on related concerns, such as nitrogen-use efficiency and varietal performance under different management systems and environmental stresses. We will also continue to identify early changes in varietal resistance, and explore ways to promote genetic diversity in pest and disease resistance.

We will continue to develop easy-to-use formats for presenting RL results, including digital options, to deliver better ways to analyse trial outputs. A 2018 review of the RL highlighted the need to increase the level of regionally focused information. In addition to the use of online resources, we will continue to work with industry to feature the RL at regional events and demonstrations.

The RL programme constantly seeks ways to improve. We will also:

• Regularly review the types of trials and traits reported
• Incorporate new technologies (where they add value)
• Adapt to developments in plant breeding
• Consult with levy payers at regular intervals (formally and informally)

Although the RL cannot answer all the questions that levy payers have, it will continue to evolve to maintain its core values of providing information that is robust, independent and relevant.

The RL programme is a collaboration between AHDB, the trade associations of the flour milling and malting industries (UK Flour Millers and MAGB, respectively) and crop breeders (represented by BSPB).