Ask An Expert: Ed Stanford on seed breeding
What should all UK arable farmers know about seed breeding? And how can breeding contribute to long-term profitability for your farming business?
In this month’s Ask An Expert video, Ed Stanford from RAGT Seeds discusses seed breeding with Hectare Trading’s co-founder, arable farmer Andrew Huxham.
Listen now to this fascinating and free-ranging discussion. Ed covers:
How UK plant breeding helps maintain stable yields and disease resistance despite changing environmental pressures
How modern breeding focuses on improving profitability, reducing input costs and matching varieties to individual farm conditions
The UK’s varied and unpredictable climate, necessitating extensive regional seed trials and careful variety selection
The shared challenges breeders and farmers face from uncertain policy, shifting markets and concerns over long-term UK food security
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This article is for general information only and does not constitute advice. While we make every effort to ensure the accuracy of the content at the time of publication, Hectare Trading makes no guarantee regarding the data provided.
Transcript
Andrew Huxham
Hello, welcome to Ask an Expert. This time around we’ve got Ed Stanford with us from RAGT. We’re going to be talking about plant breeding, a topic which I believe as a farmer is probably fairly poorly understood but actually something that, as a farmer, it has a huge impact on everything I do and grow. How do you think seed breeding contributes to profitable arable farming within the UK as we are at the moment?
Ed Stanford
Yeah, it’s a good question. So firstly, obviously the main thing that contributes to profitable farming is farmers. There’s nothing that takes away from that. We are farmers. I am a farmer.
So a big part of seed breeding that people very often overlook is the ability to continue doing the same thing without going backwards. So we see differences in diseases, we see differences in pressures and the ability to maintain the same yields. Even though some farmers might think, well, hang on, why is it not getting better and better and better? Because obviously there’s natural capabilities of fields and everything else. But the fact that we’re not getting worse is in itself a breeding achievement.
And then on top of that, yields of course is a big conversation. Can we keep the yield threshold going up? But more of the focus these days is on, actually, “how much money am I spending on my crop and is there a way that breeding can help me have less spend?”
It’s easy for any breeder to turn around and say, “Oh, our varieties are always resilient." Because there’s a natural element of disease breakdown, but also you need something that does what it says on the tin. And making a choice for yield is fine if you’re sure that you’re going to have a certain number of fields that are within your spray window, that are within your spray capabilities by the size of your machinery. But there’s also considerations to make about, well, what about that field at the end of the A road? It takes you half a day to get there. If the spray windows are closing, it’s not going to get done, is it? It’s more than just one variety for one farm. You know, there’s a choice of varieties, there’s a choice of end markets, and you need to make sure that the choices you’re making match your whole business structure.
Within the UK, you know, we have the west wind that brings rain across to Ireland and Wales, the South West. We’ve got bigger amounts of daylight but yet colder weather in Scotland. We’ve got dry weather in the east that sometimes doesn’t get any rain, but the village next to it gets all of the rain. You know, there’s lots of different climatic conditions. And being a maritime climate in the UK is a very unique place to breed for.
To breed a good variety for the UK takes a big trials network. Breeding is 50% breeding and it’s 50% trials in layman’s terms. You put all of your effort into breeding and bringing genetics to the market, but ultimately you have to have a trials network to say, “How does this perform in South Wales versus North Norfolk?”
As an industry, we’ve been trying to find ways to make it that plants are as efficient as possible. But it is really tricky because, ultimately, the market standard for yield for a feed wheat, as well as for a milling wheat, is at a level where if you say in this variety it’s more profitable but you’re going to make so much less money than you are by having the high-input situation that no one in their right mind would do it – it doesn’t stack up as a business decision.
So we’re getting there with breeding to try and find it. And one thing that we are certainly doing, which isn’t from a breeding point of view, from a trials point of view, we’re trying to create data packages as an industry that show, you know, this is what happens when you grow this variety with slightly less nitrogen, so that farmers know that, on certain varieties, don’t try it, you have to put the nitrogen in to get the result back.
For me, the biggest challenge that breeding is facing, even now, is the same challenges farmers are facing because, at the end of the day, farmers need to make money to be a business and farmers need to have end markets. And I’m not talking about how any one specific end market is paying. I’m talking about the perception of food by the consumer, the perception of food importance by the policymakers.
If I say to you about SFI, and I said to you, “OK, it takes two years to produce clover seed, so how much clover seed am I going to need for SFI in 2032?” You’d turn around and say, “Well, I don’t know if there’s going to be an SFI in 2032.” And so, there’s those kind of challenges for breeders. It’s how do you plan production? How do you plan what the future’s going to be like in the short term?
It’s kind of like the British clothing industry. So the British clothing industry is now a luxury whereas at one point it was a standard and, you know, I don’t want farming to go that way. I want farming to be seen as something that’s vital for the security. I don't want it to be something that’s seen as, oh well, we can import it. It’s like, yeah you can, until you get to a point where you rely on the imports. So we really need to make sure that the entire industries are working together.