All the news

• ‘Potential gold-mine’ for wheat breeders
  

  Scientists at Rothamsted Research have made a series of unexpected discoveries within the wheat genome which they say should lead to new wheat varieties over the coming years. These varieties could include improved traits such as greater disease resistance and better adaptation to climate change.

• New Phoma-causing fungus variant in Europe
  

  A new threat to oilseed rape (OSR) crops has been identified for the first time in Europe. The UK’s Rothamsted Research reports that a variant of a fungus that causes Phoma in OSR and other brassicas has been identified in southern England and Northern Ireland.

• Plants for the Future: report available
  

  Experts have identified three principles to help the transition towards more sustainable agricultural systems which meet the goals of the European Union’s Green Deal in a report which envisions how agriculture will be likely to evolve in the short, medium and long term.

• Going bananas…in the Netherlands!
  

  When we think of banana production, the Netherlands might not be the first country to come to mind. But bananas were indeed harvested in the country last week, the first crop from the Neder Banaan greenhouse in the town of Ede, central Netherlands. The greenhouse is the result of a collaboration with researchers from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and is using new cultivation methods and banana varieties that will contribute to more sustainable banana cultivation worldwide.

• ABIM 2021: Catch up online
  

  If you could not attend October’s Annual Biocontrol Industry Meeting (ABIM), either in person or online, you can catch up with some of the key events via ABIM’s YouTube channel. These include the meeting’s keynote addresses, a TV-style panel discussion and the Bernard Blum Award for biocontrol innovation.

• Events calendar: Updates for 2022
  

  The Events calendar is looking better than it has done for some time, with the rescheduling of events from the past 18 months in 2022, alongside newly planned conferences etc. No-one is taking things for granted, though, with some events going hybrid with a mix of online and in-person attendees and others remaining online.

• French boost for crop adaptation
  

  France is stepping up its capacity to adapt crops to climate change with the opening of two major facilities in the southern city of Montpellier. The €10.4 million Agropolis Resource Centre for Crop Conservation, Adaptation and Diversity (ARCAD), hosted by ENDURE partner INRAE, is France’s first crop conservation ‘bank’, while CIRAD’s €3 million AbioPhen greenhouses make it possible to simulate future climate conditions.

• Deadlines for EWRS Symposium
  

  Organisers of the 19th European Weed Research Society Symposium are hopeful the event will finally go ahead in June 2022, a year later than originally planned. The event, ‘Lighting the future of weed science’, is scheduled for 20-23 June 2022 at The Eugenides Foundation (commonly known as the planetarium) in Athens, Greece.

• IPM Decisions: DSS on track for next year
  

  IPM Decisions is on track to provide access to 17 Decision Support Systems (DSS) through its online platform early in 2022. Scheduled for the first release are DSS dealing with common diseases such as late blight in potato, early blight in tomato and downy mildew in lettuce, alongside invertebrate pests such as carrot rust fly, cabbage moth and cabbage root fly.

• Rarer crops to return to European fields
  

  Six ‘forgotten’ arable crops will be making a comeback in European fields over the next four years, driven by a new project called CROPDIVA (Climate Resilient Orphan croPs for increased DIVersity in Agriculture). The crops concerned are oats, triticale, buckwheat, faba beans, lupins and hull-less barley.