UK experts have recommended a three-pronged approach for the sustainable management of black-grass, an increasingly herbicide-resistant weed which is a particular problem in autumn-sown cereal crops.
ENDURE partner Rothamsted Research is part of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB) Black-Grass Resistance Initiative (BGRI), which recently staged a workshop bringing together farmers, industry and researchers to help concentrate the UK’s black-grass management efforts.
The Rothamsted Research website reports: “Three areas of focus were identified at the workshop: targeted farmer-to-farmer learning, to optimise management systems in the short term; focused applied research, to provide integrated management solutions in the medium term; and fundamental research, to develop game-changing technologies in the long term.”
Dr Paul Gosling, who manages weed research at AHDB, told the website: “The headline grabbing topic of black-grass has fuelled multiple avenues of research, conducted within the UK and overseas. But this research effort has lacked coordination, meaning progress on managing black-grass has often been too slow and too erratic.
“The BGRI sought to address this with its multidisciplinary approach, by bringing people together with significant experience of tackling black-grass, from the field to the laboratory, to talk freely and extend the BGRI collaboration ethos right across the industry.”
In the short term, the BGRI concluded that ‘persistent messaging’ of evidence-based recommendations is required to give growers the confidence to use current management tools. The website reports that more effective seed bank and long-term population management was seen as a particular priority, which could be achieved through the increased adoption of weed monitoring and mapping techniques, in conjunction with a greater use of resistance diagnostics and testing.
Given the unlikelihood of achieving complete management of black-grass, the BGRI recommended that medium-term applied research should focus on ways of reducing the weed burden (diagnostics, alternative cropping, dormancy, and seed destruction and capture).
In the longer term, the group concluded that ‘game-changing’ technologies are needed to reverse the spread of resistant black-grass in the UK.
Dr Paul Neve, principal investigator for BGRI at Rothamsted Research, told the website: “There are some really exciting, yet high-risk, high-reward, developments in the pipeline. Many of these capture the value in emerging areas of science, such as weed genomics, diagnostics, remote sensing, and big data and modelling applications.
“These long-term solutions may be years away, and, until then, it is all about the hard graft associated with combining multiple approaches to keep a lid on the problem.”
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Last update: 24/05/2023 - ENDURE © 2009 - Contact ENDURE - Disclaimer