Europe
June 24, 2013
ENDURE is delighted to welcome a new member into its ranks, Scotland's The James Hutton Institute. The Institute was created in April 2011, bringing together the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute and SCRI (Scottish Crop Research Institute), both of which have illustrious histories. Here, Geoff Squire and Nick Birch, of the Institute's Ecological Sciences division, explain the reasons for joining ENDURE.
They write: “The James Hutton Institute is joining ENDURE to gain the benefits of working together with like-minded people on some of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. Maintaining a high and efficient output of agricultural produce with minimal negative effect on the environment will not be solvable by local action alone. Many of the inputs and much of the produce in agriculture are bought and sold internationally. Europe will need large-scale, systematic policies and action to make a difference for the better, for example, to the global reliance on pesticides.
The science and practice underpinning Integrated Pest Management (IPM) have hardly been favoured compared to those in many other areas of modern technology. Much of the expertise lies in small groups, lacking critical mass and prone to fragmentation. ENDURE offers the opportunity to bring such expertise into a coordinated whole, and through this to develop strategic priorities and to influence funding streams and policy at a European level.
The Institute's areas of expertise have traditionally included microbial, virus and invertebrate pests and pathogens of potato, cereals and soft fruit. Practical contributions to IPM arising from this work include crop varieties having resistance to pests and pathogens, cereal variety mixtures that both reduce the spread of disease and stabilise yield and various traps and lures that prevent pests establishing in the crop. The Institute is also a centre for work on weed seedbank plants, whose negative effect on yield and positive effects on farmland food webs needs to be balanced by proactive and long term management.
Aerial view of the Centre for Sustainable Cropping, Balruddery. Copyright: The James Hutton Institute.
More recently, the Institute has begun to apply its crop- and pest-specific expertise to IPM on scales much greater than the field or protected plot. Earlier work on gene flow in the landscape laid a foundation for IPM studies over long time periods and extensive landscapes. Managing the working history and orientation of fields in total will become just as important for practical IPM as managing the crops and agronomy in each field.
Becoming part of a network of research and extension platforms is one of the benefits of joining ENDURE. The James Hutton Institute has been building its own platforms in recent years, both on its research farms and in the wider region. The Institute is well positioned to represent the maritime agriculture of the north-east Atlantic region, characterised by long, cool summers in which crops receive a high total solar radiation, and relatively mild winters. The agriculture that has evolved in this climate is high yielding and diverse, consisting of various combinations of arable crops, horticulture and pasture. The region complements well the working environments of other ENDURE partners in a range of agro-climatic zones including Mediterranean and continental.
Among our platforms is the East of Scotland Site Network, comprising fields on around 50 farms that act as foci for studies of integrated management at scales from patch to landscape. On its farms near Dundee, the Institute runs a range of IPM experiments for research and demonstration. Its long term approach to issues of farming and the land is being realised in the Centre for Sustainable Cropping, a 40 ha, long term platform of six fields and six crops rotating among fields in sequence. Each field is split into one form of management that tracks current best practice and another that seeks to deflect the curent trajectory based on high inputs to an agronomy and biophysical state that are resilient and sustainable in the long term. IPM is one of a range of management approaches applied on the platform. Other topics receiving attention are nutrient (fertiliser) inputs, soil biophysical condition, cycles of energy and matter and trophic interactions.
The Institute believes that its experimental platforms will benefit from being linked into an effective, pan-European network of experimental sites, working in a concerted way on IPM. Such a network will be seen to represent levels of commitment and expertise sufficient to attract a wide range of scientists and extension workers from all parts of Europe and beyond. Being part of the ENDURE network should also give weight to the Institute in its discussions with government and stakeholder interests on developments in IPM.
Finally, ENDURE has shown the benefits of creating a means by which further value can be realised from projects beyond the typical three to four years of funding. The Institute has a range of completed projects that will now contribute to the wider efforts in ENDURE, and sees that its achievements in current projects such as PURE, which aims to reduce reliance on pesticides in agriculture, will have impact well after the nominal end in 2014.
The James Hutton Institute looks forward to taking an active role in ENDURE, notably through its research and extension platforms, by sharing expertise in a range of crops, invertebrate pests, weeds and diseases, and in its outreach to schools and the public.”
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