Agricultural research and development will be the key to producing more food and creating more profitable farms but farmers themselves must be prepared to increase their share of the funding.
That was a key message when former Scottish Crop Research Institute chairman Jim Godfrey spoke in Dundee.
“I am very strong in this view,” he said.
“Out of £368 million spent on agricultural research in the UK only £21m came from producers, mostly through levies paid to the six sectoral divisions within the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB).
“It should be far more.”
It would be a safe bet to say Mr Godfrey, who farms in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, will have filled more board positions in research institutes and funding bodies than any other farmer in the UK.
His global interests have included potatoes in Peru and rice in south-east Asia.
Speaking at the Scottish Society of Crop Research annual meeting at James Hutton Institute’s Mylnefield site, he listed the advantages of farming in the UK citing access to world-class science, skilled farmers and farm staff, an affluent society willing and able to buy food and good soils and climate.
On the down side there was the burden of EU and UK regulation especially regarding any uptake of GM technology.
He also bemoaned the fact that farm policy was not based on science and the available evidence base.
“The supermarkets say the right things but really they are only interested in market advantage,” he continued.
“We also suffer from a fragmented research base with a plethora of institutes in the UK and a depletion of work on applied science.”
Nonetheless these hurdles had to be overcome if there was to be a step change in agricultural production, he argued.
In the 1960s Norman Borlaug’s work on wheat in Mexico introduced dwarf varieties with hugely improved yields.
Dr MS Swannithan’s research in India led remarkably to the country becoming an exporter of food.
“Without their work the world would need 1m hectares more land in cultivation than we have now” said Mr Godfrey.
Looking to the future he could see a number of areas ripe for development.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was to be commended for funding research aimed at creating cereal crops able to fix their own nitrogen through root nodules.
“Will it happen?” he asked.
“Possibly it will but my fear is that fixing nitrogen will be a big drain on energy from the plant and yields will suffer.”
Mr Godfrey added: “We farm arable potatoes and pigs.
“I know from our own feed mill that soya is deficient in at least four amino acids and we can supply these by mixing in synthetic products.
“I wonder if we could one day see all animal proteins being supplied by synthetics. That would have major ramifications for world agriculture.”
Turning to the rice crop he pointed to work carried out by the International Rice Research Council (IRRC).
Recent work by the IRRC had resulted in the production of varieties that could survive for 17 days under water and already more than 1m growers were benefiting.
GM technology would be a part of the revolution but the traits introduced would need to have consumer benefits before they would be popular.
Mr Godfrey cited IRRC’s Golden Rice project as an example.
By using GM to enhance beta carotene levels the potential for preventing child blindness and infant mortality was huge.
The second generation of Golden Rice selections were now showing good levels of beta carotene and field scale cropping could be under way by 2018.