All the news

• Win-win with strip cropping, says WUR
  

  The multiple benefits of strip cropping are highlighted in a recent report from Wageningen University & Research (WUR), which has been studying the approach for several years. This year more than 20 Dutch farmers, both conventional and organic, have begun or expanded strip cropping, which helps attract more beneficial insects into fields and slows disease spread.

• Insights into barriers to crop diversification
  

  DiverIMPACTS researchers have analysed the project’s 25 case studies to explore the extent to which barriers to crop diversification are related to the setting in which they emerge. The project’s multi-actor case studies are allocated to one of five clusters: service crops, crop diversification under adverse conditions, crop diversification in systems from Western Europe, diversification through intercropping, with a special focus on grain legumes, and the diversification of vegetable cropping systems.

• Farmers urged to share yield monitor data
  

  Researchers from the Horizon 2020 EcoStack project are urging farmers to share their yield monitor data from GPS-enabled combine harvesters. The data will be used to help researchers establish “how landscape features found just beyond the field affects variation in crop yield, and whether yield decline towards the edge of fields can be reduced by the presence of certain types of field boundaries”.

• WUR to investigate wild potato potential
  

  Wageningen University & Research (WUR), ENDURE’s Dutch partner, is to turn its attention to wild potatoes in the search for resistance to a wide range of potato pests and diseases. WUR says pests and diseases in potato crops are likely to increase due to increasing extremes in temperature and rainfall combined with a reduction in chemical solutions.

• System experiments: Take the survey!
  

  Are you involved in system experiments, whether at the project stage, ongoing or completed? If so and you can spare a few minutes, you can take part in a survey forming part of a PhD thesis focusing on ‘Methodological contributions to experimental and observational approaches in agronomy and agroecology’ being conducted by Sandrine Longis (a CIFRE Arvalis thesis in collaboration with INRAE’s Agroecologies, Innovations and Ruralities combined research unit (UMR AGIR)).

• SusCrop newsletter now available
  

  The second newsletter from ERA-Net SusCrop is now available, bringing readers up to date with the activities of the Cofund Action under H2020, which “aims to strengthen the European Research Area (ERA) in the field of Sustainable Crop Production through enhanced cooperation and coordination of different national and regional research programmes”.

• LCA ‘limited’ in agroecology assessments
  

  The most commonly used method for analysing the environmental impacts of agricultural systems tends to overlook major factors such as biodiversity, soil quality, pesticide impacts and societal shifts, reports France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE).

• Agroscope to lead Japanese beetle project
  

  Agroscope, ENDURE’s Swiss partner, is to lead a €5.5 million project to develop sustainable strategies for controlling the quarantine pest, Japanese beetle. The pest was first detected on Switzerland’s southern border in 2017 and it threatens to spread further into Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe.

• Ensuring successful control strategies
  

  An international team of researchers lead by Rothamsted Research has examined the factors that make or break campaigns to stop invading plant pathogens, concluding that educating growers about the effectiveness of control strategies is more important than emphasising the risks posed by the disease.

• EuroBlight unveils 2019 monitoring results
  

  EuroBlight, the international consortium tracking the spatial distribution of Phytophthora infestans, the pathogen responsible for late blight in potato crops, has published the results of its extensive 2019 survey work, revealing the distribution and diversity of dominant clones in the crop.