All the news

• IWMPRAISE: Latest newsletter now available
  

  IWMPRAISE (Integrated Weed Management: PRActical Implementation and Solutions for Europe) has produced its fourth newsletter, bringing readers up to date with the latest news from the Horizon 2020 project. The project is now entering its fourth and penultimate year and 2020 should have seen the finalisation of experiments and a plethora of workshops and open days, activities which were rendered impossible by the Covid-19 pandemic.

• Have you signed up for ENDURE News?
  

  Have you subscribed to ENDURE News, the newsletter produced every six months? The latest edition was published at the end of June and offers a useful recap of all that has been happening on the website. This includes the publication of our extensive survey on glyphosate use in European agriculture, revealing the variety of uses for which it is used and the cropping systems which depend on it.

• Learning in the virtual world
  

  Covid-19 has meant that we have all had to adapt our working practices, ensure social distancing and keep colleagues and family safe. For many of us it has seen a major increase in the use of online meetings and this has certainly been the case for Certiphyto’s world tour. The tour had barely kicked off in the French Caribbean (pictured right, a visit to an organic producer in Martinique) when France went into lockdown, bringing what should have been a 22-date tour to a rapid halt.

• PhD to focus on pest modelling in rice
  

  France’s INRAE and CIRAD are offering a PhD focusing on modelling “multiple pests in rice crops for agroecological rice protection in Cambodia”. The PhD should help tackle the excessive use of pesticides in Cambodian rice crops, where up to 13 treatments are used each cropping season, leading to some European exports being refused because of excess residues.

• IWMPRAISE offers IWM inspiration
  

  IWMPRAISE, the Horizon 2020 project dedicated to Integrated Weed Management (IWM), has produced a series of ‘inspiration sheets’ over recent weeks. They present guidance on techniques such as inter-row hoeing in small grain cereals and improving crop diversification through the use of intercrops and subsidiary crops, alongside a series of inspiration sheets on the biology and management of a selection of weeds.

• 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.

• Report: Glyphosate use in Europe
  

  Despite being the most widely used herbicide in the world and the subject of controversy regarding its direct and indirect effects, little information is available on the quantitative aspects of glyphosate, such as its use in European countries. This has now been addressed with the publication of an ENDURE report, 'A survey on the uses of glyphosate in European countries'.