RuSource Briefings

Briefing 1062: Climate change: solutions from the grassland sector

Plant breeding is a cost effective route to delivering increased production and improved environmental protection. High sugar ryegrass (HSG) varieties, bred at IBERS, improve (nitrogen) N use in the rumens of cattle and sheep, reducing emissions and increasing milk and meat production. Modern clovers are a high yielding and persistent quality forage that can replace fertilizer and reduce nitrous oxide emissions. Birdsfoot trefoil has high palatability and could be useful to farmers at sites with low fertility, particularly in the uplands. Utilisation of grass for animal production in the UK can be viewed as inefficient relative to other food production systems, and we need to involve all parts of the food chain in determining research and knowledge transfer requirements.
IBERS and RASE

Briefing 1063: Climate change - arable crops

UK farmers are well placed to increase arable production with a warming temperate climate, a Government food strategy that supports an increase in sustainable food production and a developing biofuels market. But there are other objectives including recapturing the benefits of set-aside, improving the water environment reducing nitrous oxide emissions from soils, managing market volatility and rising input prices, coping with changing pest and disease pressures, and changing pesticides regulation. Efficient use of resources is essential to maintaining profitability, as is the development and uptake of new technologies and plant varieties to maintain yield improvements in a changing climate.
Farming Futures

Briefing 1064: Where is our energy going to come from?

No one single technology or solution can provide all farm energy in the right place, at the right time and in the right form. We need to be open to all new forms of energy generation and the impact that these new energy technologies will have on our landscape, homes and businesses. If we are to maintain anything close to our existing lifestyles and foster a competitive agricultural sector we need new sustainable forms of energy and we need them soon.
ADAS

Briefing 1065: Recommendations for EU dairy sector

The EU High Level Expert Group on Milk has recommended to the Commission that it moves to enhance the use of written contracts, should consider proposals to increase the collective bargaining power of dairy producers, look at the feasibility of interprofessional groups in the dairy chain, further increase dairy chain transparency, consider ‘green box' measures to reduce income volatility, extend marketing standards and origin labelling and improve research and its communication.

Briefing 1066: Budget cuts and rural jobs

Massive reductions in public sector expenditure are bad news for rural areas which are more dependent on average than urban England on public sector employment. Whilst the huge public sector deficit cannot be addressed without significant pain all round careful thinking is needed in how that pain is shared out to avoid unintended consequences.
Ivan Annibal, Rose Regeneration