Recommended Lists for cereals and oilseeds (RL) delivery strategy 2022–27

To help meet the challenges facing the UK arable sector, farmers need to grow appropriate varieties of cereals and oilseeds. Here we explain the focus of the RL over the next five years and how it will maintain delivery of independent information to support the variety selection process.

The RL provides information on yield and quality performance, agronomic features and market options. It brings data analysis and insight together in easy-to-use formats to help farmers and agronomists make better variety decisions.

The basis of the RL first edition (1944) was a narrative description (by the National Institute of Agricultural Botany) of 16 wheat varieties. Since that time, the variety trialling project has evolved. Now managed by AHDB, it involves more than 400 trials – spread from Cornwall to Aberdeenshire – delivering vast amounts of data for 11 crops each year.

The overall aim of the RL consortium and its members is:

• To ensure a successful route to market for new cereal and oilseed varieties with appropriate agronomic and quality characteristics

Such varieties will enable all businesses – from farmers to end users – to maintain the productivity and competitiveness of the UK grain supply chain.

Over the next 5–10 years, UK arable agriculture faces unprecedented challenges, including:

• Replacement of area payments with payment for public goods
• The loss of pesticide active ingredients to legislation, and to pest and disease resistance
• Rising input costs
• Greater unpredictability of weather patterns
• Increasing sustainability and achieving net zero

Meeting these challenges will test many farm businesses to the limit. Key to meeting these challenges is selecting the right varieties. It remains vital to have robust and independent information, delivered through the RL, to support that selection.

In 2018–19, AHDB conducted an 18-month ‘Look Ahead’ review of the RL processes and aims. It involved all stakeholders and resulted in a list of recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the RL. Many of these have already been actioned – including the production of digital solutions, such as the RL app and online variety selection tools.

However, the RL cannot stand still and will continue to evolve to meet the challenges ahead.

The delivery strategy

As the industry changes and adapts over the coming years, the RL will adapt to ensure that the varieties recommended help farm businesses and the supply chain respond to the challenges ahead. To meet the needs of levy payers over the next five years (2022–27) and beyond, the RL will continue to evolve.

Yield has always been a key breeding target and it remains so, not only because of its close link to profitability but also because it is a robust proxy for resource use efficiency.

Recently, however, as input costs have risen and pesticides have been withdrawn from sale, growers have increasingly looked to genetic solutions. They are valuing pest and disease resistance more, alongside yield, in their variety selections. In response, crop breeding and RL variety selection have placed more emphasis on pest and disease ratings. This allows lower-yielding but resistant varieties onto the lists. The RL also features enhanced reporting of new pest and disease traits.

In addition to yield and pest and disease resistance, the project consortium will consider how the RL can help meet the challenges to levy payers posed by the issues of climate change, sustainability, and net zero. The RL cannot solve these problems alone. However, genetic improvement and variety selection are key building blocks – influencing crop management and environmental impact.

Varietal selection also determines the end market for grain. As a result, varieties must continue to meet the quality requirements of the flour millers, maltsters, and others in the supply chain, and their customers.

The RL may also be increasingly required to meet the needs of the energy crop sector.

The removal of area payments and the switch to payment for public goods will pose challenges for the financial performance of many farm businesses. By facilitating the inclusion of varieties on the lists with improved pest and disease resistance, the RL can enable reductions in input costs. Similarly, working with others, including AHDB Monitor Farms and Strategic Farms, can help identify varieties that perform well in reduced tillage and regenerative systems. This may also reduce costs and facilitate the adoption of revised management systems.

Key to ensuring financial success is realising premiums for meeting market specifications, where these are available. The RL will continue to work closely with flour millers and maltsters to ensure recommended varieties include those that meet their specifications and the needs of their customers. The RL will continue to facilitate the introduction of new quality traits, though specialist categories, where necessary. This will maintain or enhance access to markets for grain, both in the UK and overseas.

Variety selection is the most important step in IPM for cereals and oilseeds. As the tools available for plant protection grow ever fewer, the need for IPM grows ever stronger. The RL is supporting this transition 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 through the use of specialist categories and acceptance of breeders claims for traits, where the evidence supports this. The RL expects to use this mechanism more in future to help bring further novel traits into the supply chain.

The RL will work with AHDB research and knowledge exchange teams to better understand how to deploy resistance in the field and identify where variety selection can help in the management of intractable problems, such as cabbage stem flea beetle.

Environmental sustainability and the drive towards net zero are increasingly influencing farm management and the choices made by maltsters, flour millers and their customers.

The RL already improves pest and disease resistance and yield – and drives better on-farm resource use. It will carry on doing so. The RL will continue to identify early changes in the resistance status of varieties and explore ways to promote genetic diversity in pest and disease resistance, thereby ensuring sustainability of both the environment and levy-payer businesses.

Because crop management plays an important role in determining environmental outcomes, the RL will work with research partners on related concerns, such as nitrogen use efficiency and varietal performance. This will include the examination of tillage regimes and regenerative systems, as well as variety resilience under environmental stress. The RL focus will be to identify where variety choice can influence environmental outcomes and to facilitate the introduction of new traits that drive better performance.

The RL presents its information in publications with easy-to-use formats that are freely available. Digital formats are continually evolving to enable easier access to RL data and provide tools for its interrogation. The RL will seek to improve these further to make variety selection even easier.

The Look Ahead review highlighted the need for more regionalised data and the RL will increase its production of regionally focussed information on yields and traits that are regionally important.

Events and demonstrations will be employed by AHDB, working closely with partner organisations, to deliver the independent variety information that farmers and agronomists value.

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

• Continue to seek better ways to analyse the outputs of trials, to allow more rapid delivery of results in easy-to-understand formats
• Regularly review the types of trials and traits reported, to ensure that the RL delivers the information growers and processors need
• Incorporate new technologies, such as drones and in-field sensors, into the trials system (where it adds value)
• Continue to monitor developments in breeding, such as gene editing and new hybrid crops, to ensure that the RL system is able to test them appropriately
• Continue to conduct formal and informal consultations with levy payers at regular intervals, to gather the valued opinions of growers and other levy payers on the way the RL works

Although the RL cannot answer all the questions that levy payers have, it will continue to evolve to ensure its core values of robust and independent information, coupled with relevance, are maintained.

The three RL crop committees (wheat, barley and other cereals, and oilseeds) are the technical powerhouses of the RL system. They make recommendations to the RL Board on how the RL system works and determine the varieties that are selected for trialling and added to the RL.

The committees rely on technical expertise from across the industry, including growers and agronomists, breeders and end-user businesses. Each year, vacancies on these committees are advertised (around December). If you would like to guide the direction of the RL and help make critical variety decisions, look out for these vacancies and join the RL programme.

You will help the RL meet the needs of the farming industry, now and into the future.

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).

It is governed by the RL Board, which comprises representatives of the four partner organisations, under the terms of the Collaboration Agreement for the Development and Publication of AHDB Recommended Lists. 

In addition to their responsibilities as consortium members, each organisation retains responsibility for specific activities:

• UK Flour Millers for testing wheat for baking
• MAGB for testing barley for malting, distilling and brewing
• BSPB and its constituent members for the breeding and marketing of new varieties
• AHDB for knowledge exchange across the supply chain

The joint working of farmers – with plant breeders, maltsters and millers – to select varieties and develop the RL provides a powerful voice in the direction of plant breeding. This collaboration also ensures that the varieties selected for inclusion on the RL meet the technical requirements of the malting, brewing, distilling and flour milling industries, as well as the agronomic needs of farmers. This ensures the supply of raw materials into these sectors and a market for farmers’ grain.