The White Rose Sustainable Agriculture Consortium is Launched

The first two major projects from the White Rose Sustainable Agriculture Consortium were launched last Friday at Wetherby. The Consortium is a fairly loose collection of people mostly from the Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield, along with colleagues from FERA and Manchester, all interested in sustainable agriculture with a focus on soils research at farm level. We run the field-scale experiments at the University of Leeds farm near Tadcaster. Both projects address the question of how to enhance the resilience of modern arable agriculture to the increased variability of weather. Our proposed answer is to enhance the functioning of soil in our fields, to reverse some of the degradation we have seen over the last decades of intensive cropping and to make it more like the less disturbed soils to be found in hedgerows. Both projects focus on boosting the role of mycorrhizae, soil fungi that form associations with plants, taking carbon from them but providing nutrients and, it seems, increased resistance to diseases and pests.

MycoRihzaSoil looks at the prospects from the technology end, by selecting lines of wheat that are good at forming associations with these organisms, and sowing them with and without added mycorrhizae inoculumn, with and without tillage. SoilBioHedge looks to see if we can mycorrhizae and earthworms to move into field centres from field boundaries along strips of managed grass.

The meeting brought the full team of scientists together for the first time, along with collaborators and reviewers. We listened to each other's talks that explained the projects, and went to the University farm to have a look at the early stages of the experiments.

I've worked with many large teams of scientists before, crossing many disciplines. But this team was somehow more challenging that usual. I realise that most of the teams I work with all focus at the same scale, roughly from whole plant to landscape, focussing on a field. We therefore tend to look at the world in the same way, even from different angles. But the White Rose team has people that focus on molecular, right through to national. They frame key questions in very different ways. When we talk, it seems easy to see how it all fits together, but it's going to be hard to bring together results that cross so many scales in ways that tell coherent stories to crop breeders, agro-technologists and farmers.

I'll include links to project websites when we've had time to put them together!

Jonathan Leake, lead scientist for both projects, shows the difference between the rich brown soil from beneath the hedge and the lighter, more compacted soil from the field

The lines of winter wheat. They may look the same now, but they differ in how easily they associate with mycorrhizae. The lines for the main field experiment will be a subset of these.

Walking across a field of winter wheat to one of the SoilBioHedge plots

A grassy strip will be sown into the wheat field from the hedge. Will the soil organisms travel along this strip into the field? If so, how long will it take them?