The SusCrop ERA-Net (Cofund on Sustainable Crop Production), which is aiming to “strengthen the European Research Area (ERA) in the field of Sustainable Crop Production through enhanced cooperation and coordination of different national and regional research programmes”, has released news of a rake of projects focused on more sustainable agriculture.
These projects comprise:
To take just a few examples of the type of work these projects are tackling, AC/DC-weeds is developing agroecological technologies to manage creeping perennial weeds on arable land. It is focusing on three species which are important in northern and central Europe, investigating new techniques and optimising crop husbandry. Since creeping perennials occur in patches, researchers are work on mapping, identifying and delineating them in fields using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones).
The potatoMETAbiome project is seeking to exploit the principle that plants naturally interact with beneficial (soil) microbes, making them less dependent on synthetic inputs. The SusCrop website notes: “The greater the belowground diversity in the soil the better the prospects of plant roots to recruit beneficial microbes to mobilise nutrients, reduce stresses and suppress pathogens. This approach will be particularly beneficial for potato cultivation where many varieties have underdeveloped root systems and are susceptible to pests and other environmental stress factors.
“This project aims at identifying potato genotypes that interact effectively with the soil microbiome, thus generating cultivars that have reduced dependencies on external inputs (synthetic fertilisers and pesticides) while maintaining high yield, under non-stress as well as biotic (pathogen pressure) and abiotic stress conditions.”
WheatSustain notes that high-density low-cost marker genotyping platforms have enabled a paradigm shift in plant breeding, using genomic selection (GS) to predict the breeding values of progeny lines without costly phenotyping. The SusCrop website says: “While being useful, prediction accuracies are fairly low for complex disease resistances like stripe rust and Fusarium Head Blight, two devastating plant diseases affecting European and North American wheat production.
It adds: “WheatSustain aims to improve the accuracy by considering biologically relevant data, quantitative trait loci and marker-trait relationships to build more robust models. Results from the project have already demonstrated improved predictions of FHB resistance in European winter wheat by inclusion of anther extrusion, plant height and days to flowering into the prediction models.”
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