Waitrose working to encourage sustainable food production
By Tracey Moreton (Waitrose CTP PhD student) My Journey Starts in the beautiful region of Murcia, Spain. Here I visited celery and lettuce farms in Los Alcazares and Aguilas where I set off to collect samples of the plants infected with Sclerotinia. Over a two-day period, I visited commercial and organic farms collecting the appropriate […]
By Mandy Stoker (CTP Student) I was recently asked to visit a land owner who had a rather difficult and sensitive problem to deal with. The gentleman had been working in partnership with a business man to clean up and restock two beautiful fishing pools which were to be opened up for leisure fishing later […]
By Edward Baker (Waitrose CTP Student) With increasing public and political significance, modern environmentalism has begun to distance itself from a Laissez-faire attitude around natural ecosystem management. The most recent addition of legislation and policy direction, the 25 Year Environmental Plan, attempts to address the pressures facing the UK’s natural ecosystems from anthropogenic disturbances. […]
By Hannah McGrath (Waitrose CTP Student) In early February, I left Luton airport on a dreary Saturday morning for the sunshine in Volterra, Tuscany. I was off to attend a course on Agroecological Crop Protection (ACP), a concept I knew little about but aware that by the end of the week I would know more! […]
By Roz Wareing Waitrose CTP students, supervisors and board members attended the 2018 Waitrose Science Day, held at Scarman House. University of Warwick. The students battled snow and wind to attend our first annual conference event at the end of February. On the first afternoon the students participated in a training workshop ran by colleagues from […]
Up to half of plant and animal species in the world’s most naturally rich areas, such as the Amazon and the Galapagos, could face local extinction by the turn of the century due to climate change if carbon emissions continue to rise unchecked. The Amazon, Miombo Woodlands in Southern Africa, and south-west Australia are among […]
Efforts to protect tropical forests in Southeast Asia for the carbon they store may fail because protection payments are too low – according to University of East Anglia research. A study published today in Nature Communications finds that schemes designed to protect tropical forests from clearance based on the carbon they store do not pay enough to […]
Scientists have taken a step forward in their efforts to tackle serious crop pests by reducing the sensitivity of biopesticides to sunlight Insect pests consume around a third of all the crops we grow, sometimes threatening food security. The main way of controlling these pests is by spraying chemical pesticides but these can be damaging […]
By Dion Garrett (Waitrose CTP Student) A consent battle for dominance is being fought between grower and agricultural pest every growing season. This fight has been waged ever since civilisations required food to feed the masses. It was inevitable that various pests would take advantage of this veritable feast. To fully understand how the pieces […]
NIAB EMR, in a joint UK–China research programme, has discovered several strains of the strawberry disease Verticillium wilt (Verticillium dahliae), belonging to two different groups, that act in very different ways. The results are already being used by plant breeders in the development of a new generation of wilt resistant varieties.
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