NIAB - National Institute of Agricultural Botany
Plant Science Into Practice
Network R&D and trials
Supporting independent variety and agronomy research
NIAB TAG Network members fund the largest and longest running independent variety and agronomy dataset and trials programme in the UK. We manage over 70,000 crop trial plots every year, including over 7,500 as part of the NIAB TAG Network covering:
Crop planning
Variety and agronomy trials that underpin impartial annual input planning and decision-making.
Variety performance
Focused on refining variety decision-making with additional agronomic information from our member variety trials; adding depth to the publicly available RL variety trial data matrix. Data includes:
- Winter oilseed rape variety x row width x sowing date
- Winter and spring barley time of sowing, autumn through to spring
- Wheat varieties on sand land
- Continuous wheat
- Winter bean variety x time of sowing.
Strategic agronomy projects
Designed to respond to key longer-term issues by bringing research outcomes closer to farm practice.
Includes the NIAB TAG Network Black-grass Centre generating unique data for members to add to the current body of knowledge on black-grass management, the Centre also provides a focus for research and debate on other approaches and complementary strategies.
Other strategic projects include work on identifying wheat varieties with differing nitrogen use efficiencies, understanding oilseed rape yields and management of sterile brome ingress from headlands.