All the news

• £5 million boost to UK research
  

  Four of the United Kingdom’s leading universities and research centres have been given a £5.3 million (around €6 milllion) boost to fund their work on improving crop resilience, sustainability and quality. The recipients, including ENDURE partner Rothamsted Research (pictured), will receive the funding over the next five years to “help develop new technologies and environmentally friendly production for farmers and growers across the country”.

• Biocontrol on the march in France
  

  French Integrated Pest Management (IPM) experts have provided an update on the biological control situation in the country, where these alternative control methods continue to be become more widely used in IPM strategies. The authors identify some of the key drivers behind these developments, including legal changes to encourage the development of new biocontrol options, major investments in both public and private research, the development of experimental networks and projects and the incorporation of biocontrol in the country’s pesticide savings certificate scheme (Certificats d’Economie de Produits de Phytopharmaceutiques or CEPP).

• DiverIMPACTS: get the newsletter and flyer
  

  New ways of keeping up with the DiverIMPACTS project (Diversification through Rotation, Intercropping, Multiple Cropping, Promoted with Actors and value-Chains towards Sustainability) are now available with the publication of its first newsletter and the production of an informative flyer. Funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, DiverIMPACTS brings together 34 partners from 11 countries, including farmers and farmer organisations, advisory services, cooperatives, logistics providers, scientists, industry professionals and representatives of civil society and rural areas with the aim of exploring the full potential of diversifying cropping systems and thereby improving agricultural productivity and resource efficiency and creating sustainable value chains.

• Halving pesticide use in apple orchards
  

  Researchers from INRA (France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research) have reported on their long-term experimental work on apple orchards, which has seen them reduce pesticide use by up to 50% through a series of measures based on increased forecasting and observation of pests and diseases.

• Significant improvements required in NAPs
  

  The European Commission has urged Member States to “significantly” improve their National Action Plans (NAP) to address the shortcomings identified in their review of progress on the implementation of the Pesticides Directive (2009/128/EC) and to “establish more precise and measurable targets”.

• Search for SWD predators closes in
  

  The prospects of new biological controls to combat spotted-wing drosophila, a serious invasive pest causing extensive economic damage in berries and stone fruit, have moved a step closer thanks to two projects involving ENDURE partners.

• ‘One health’ approach to include crop pests
  

  CIRAD and INRA, two of ENDURE’s French partners, have combined forces with other research and higher educational institutions to form a network to drive innovation in the control of not only crop pests but also arthropods which transmit pathogens causing infectious diseases in humans and animals.

• ESA 2018 to address innovative systems
  

  ENDURE’s Swiss partner Agroscope is leading the organisation of the XV European Society for Agronomy Congress, which runs from August 27 to 31 in the lakeside city of Geneva and will address the theme of ‘Innovative cropping and farming systems for high quality food production.’

• Catch up with Agroecology Europe
  

  The first newsletter from Agroecology Europe is now available, offering reports and video from last October’s European Agroecology Forum, which brought together more than 300 farmers, researchers, students, policy makers and representatives from social movements and civil society in Lyon, France.

• Blight tracking results now available
  

  EuroBlight, the potato late blight network for Europe, has revealed the findings of its ongoing work to chart changes in the European population of the pathogen, a major effort which saw almost 1,500 samples from 16 countries genotyped in last year’s growing season.