All the news

• Joint German-Chinese effort to tackle SWD
  

  The Julius Kühn Institute (JKI), ENDURE’s German partner, reports on a successful multi-disciplinary symposium which brought together experts from Germany and China, in addition to representatives from Italy and Switzerland, to investigate integrated management of spotted wing drosophila (SWD) earlier this summer.

• Agroscope investigates 'Smart Farming'
  

  Agroscope, ENDURE's Swiss partner, has underlined its commitment to ‘Smart Farming’, conducting research on the topic at its Tänikon site, which is being converted into the Swiss Future Farm. The latter is designed to stimulate “professional exchanges on concrete applications with farmers”, with Agroscope investigating how new technologies can best be used in Swiss agriculture.

• BIOCOMES: ‘Mind shift for IPM’
  

  The introduction of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) often requires a ‘mind shift’ among growers and producers, with an acceptance that the high efficacy rates associated with synthetic pest management will not be matched by the introduction of biological products, reports the BIOCOMES project in its latest newsletter.

• New EU project to focus on crop diversification
  

  A major new five-year project was launched in May 2017 to explore the full potential of diversifying cropping systems in order to provide improved productivity, resource efficiency and sustainable value chains. Called DiverIMPACTS, the project is being coordinated by ENDURE coordinator Antoine Messéan (INRA, France) and brings together a broad consortium comprising 34 partners from 11 European countries, including farmers and farmers’ organisations, advisory services, cooperatives, logistics providers, scientists, industry, and representatives of civil society and rural areas.

• First Agroecology Europe Forum to be held
  

  Agroecology Europe, a European association to promote agroecology created in 2016 by 19 founding members from 10 countries, is to stage its first Agroecology Europe Forum this autumn and will be focusing on ‘Fostering synergies between movements, science and practice’.

• Knowledge sharing for biopesticide efficacy
  

  Britain’s Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB) is seeking to boost the efficacy of biopesticides by improving users’ knowledge about which products should be used under which circumstances and providing more details on how they should be applied in practical situations.

• Special issue focuses on PURE results
  

  A special issue entitled ‘Pesticide use and risk reduction with IPM’ of the international journal Crop Protection has recently been published. The special issue is the fruit of the research collaboration conducted within the European Union’s PURE project (Pesticide Use and-risk Reduction in European farming systems with Integrated Pest Management), coordinated by Françoise Lescourret (pictured right), a well-known scientist affiliated to INRA, one of ENDURE’s leading partners.

• Two new clones of ‘concern’, says EuroBlight
  

  Researchers from EuroBlight, Europe’s potato late blight network, have reported on their ongoing monitoring of the pathogen, noting a marked local expansion of two recently emerged clones in 2016.

• Insight into France’s training the trainers days
  

  For the second time in three years, ENDURE communication team leader Philippe Delval has hit the roads of France to conduct a series of special days dedicated to sharing the latest knowledge on alternative crop protection techniques with those responsible for providing the training required to obtain the obligatory certification needed to handle pesticides in the country.

• Neonicotinoids in the spotlight
  

  France has launched a €1.5 million call for projects to improve the emergence of neonicotinoid-free agriculture and explore innovative perspectives for crop production methods which avoid the use of these insecticides.