News article

Turning plants into food to eat, beer to drink and even fuel for our cars is the focus of an interactive demonstration at the Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday 13th March.

“Our ‘Crops for Food-Crops for Fuel’ exhibition will show how all the crops in fields surrounding Cambridge and across East Anglia are turned into bread, sugar, beer, cooking oil and biodiesel,” explains Dr Lydia Smith from Cambridge-based plant research organisation NIAB.

Spring Strategies 2, outlining TAG’s advice for disease control in combinable crops for the 2010 campaign, has now been posted to Members and can also be downloaded from this site.

With March arriving many growers are faced with the prospect of late sown spring crops and a bottleneck of fertiliser applications as further snow and rain keeps soils wet. TAG’s spring Field Days have now started and these and other issues will be popular topics for discussion between Members and TAG staff.

The National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) has opened a state-of-the-art glasshouse facility at its Park Farm site near Histon in Cambridge. The development, which incorporates the latest greenhouse technology and biomass heating, replaces older glasshouses due for demolition at the main NIAB site on Huntingdon Road.

The National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) has welcomed the Government’s Food 2030 strategy, launched by Environment Secretary Hilary Benn at this year’s Oxford Farming Conference, as a clear signal that the Government recognises the strategic importance of food security, and the role of a competitive and productive UK farming industry in meeting future food needs.

The presentations for the Final Workshop of the BREAM (Bystander and Resident Exposure Assessment Model) project held at Robinson College in Cambridge on Thursday 7th January are now available.

Please click on the following links to view the presentations.

Please Click here: How will model be used

Please click here: BREAM - Exposure to pesticide vapours

The much-debated topic of ‘AN v Urea’ will not go away. TAG has recently updated the earlier presentation of our trial data in the context of other industry views. The presentation is available in Members’ Technical Information, Presentations.

The big freeze is just what was needed to see off the yellow rust reported as developing at several sites pre-Christmas. If not completely killed it will hopefully have been suppressed sufficiently to not bother us again for a while. Excessive winter canopies in oilseed rape crops may also have been thinned out, making TAG’s advice to its Members about autumn PGRs particularly valuable.

The Brazilian Government has used experts from the UK’s National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) to train the country’s seed testing and sampling officials to recognised international standards.

The National Institute of Agricultural Botany has awarded its Variety Cup to the onion variety Vision bred by Syngenta Seeds.

NIAB chief executive Dr Tina Barsby presented the award to Syngenta’s onion and leek product specialist Nigel Kingston and product business manager Michel Bremaud, at the UK Onion and Carrot Conference and Exhibition’s Gala Dinner in Peterborough.