{"id":3513,"date":"2020-10-28T09:19:14","date_gmt":"2020-10-28T09:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/?p=3513"},"modified":"2020-10-29T10:40:53","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T10:40:53","slug":"bringing-a-little-corner-of-africa-to-lancaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/2020\/10\/bringing-a-little-corner-of-africa-to-lancaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing a little corner of Africa to Lancaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

RECIRCULATE post-doc Ryan Edge shares the joys and challenges of growing rice at 55\u00b0N<\/strong><\/p>\n

Have you been enjoying the blogs in The FLOW?\u00a0 I certainly have, they have helped me see the \u2018bigger picture\u2019 of all we are doing in the GCRF-funded<\/a> RECIRCULATE project. I know that\u2019s one aim of The FLOW- to share our \u201cRECIRCULATE stories<\/a>\u201d, but it\u2019s struck that we haven\u2019t yet heard all that much about what it\u2019s actually like doing<\/u> research within the project.\u00a0 Of course, that will be different for everyone- it would be great to hear them all- but this is my story. \u201cA day in the research life of Ryan Edge\u201d if you like.<\/p>\n

I drove to work in the dark this morning. My arms and legs were stiff from the drive and the cold. It was only about 8-degrees. The cold air combined with my face mask to mist up my glasses. \u00a0If that all sounds pretty irritating then, believe me, it\u2019s almost reassuring. After our prolonged lock down period it\u2019s great to be back to my normal morning routine- and back to \u2018hands-on\u2019 research.<\/p>\n

Even better, any gloomy winter morning feelings were scorched away as soon as I entered my greenhouse.\u00a0 I stepped from 8-degree darkness into 30-degree heat and near-blinding light. The sharp change in environment meant that if my glasses weren\u2019t fogged up before, they certainly were now.\u00a0 But once I\u2019d got through the shock of the change in conditions, I could have been thousands of miles away in the middle of Africa. \u00a0And that\u2019s the whole point. Not for my benefit but to make my rice seedlings feel at home! We are testing new techniques for growing rice and we need the conditions to be as close as possible to the field trials run by our partner CSIR in Africa<\/a>. If we have things right, then from the rice plants\u2019 perspective this large glass box in the north of England should feel just like a little slice of Ghana.<\/p>\n

Bringing West African growing conditions to Lancaster is anything but easy though. Let\u2019s start with the greenhouse installation itself.\u00a0 Are you expecting me to tell you about all the amazing \u2018tech\u2019?\u00a0 Well, I\u2019ll do that, but plant science is often an eclectic mix of the cutting edge and the mundane. So yes, providing anything like Ghanaian sunshine needs an array of high-powered lights suspended from the ceiling.\u00a0 But getting the temperature right relies on much simpler systems. Metal radiators at the bottom of all the walls provide the heat while ratcheted windows and fans work to control the temperature and humidity, all controlled by an array of sensors.<\/p>\n

The lights and the heat may be the obvious parts of making our Ghanaian rice feel at home, but don\u2019t forget the soil. In fact, as you may have read in blogs from my colleagues working in the \u201cWater for Food Production<\/a>\u201d elements of RECIRCULATE, it\u2019s what we do with soil and watering regimes that really matter.\u00a0 Without the context that comes from working with colleagues in Ghana and Nigeria, I admit I might have used benches stacked with small plant pots. That\u2019s pretty much the standard approach to greenhouse-based research in the UK. However, to even come close to our partners\u2019 field experiments within RECIRCULATE I needed to get to grips with a very different approach.\u00a0 So out with small pots and in with one cubic metre tubs, all filled with multiple tons of soil. The larger volume allows us to grow plants together in conditions much closer to a field crop than single plants growing in small pots.<\/p>\n

I quickly realised that watering such large volumes of soil would be an arduous task using a watering can! Instead a crisp set of copper pipes leads to every tank.\u00a0 On the end of each pipe are a variety of alien looking valves that allow us to precisely automate the water levels in tanks. Amidst the sea of high-tech plumbing are nestled several water meters not dissimilar those found in a house. As my experiments run, the dials spin and the numbers tick ever higher. I am eternally grateful that unlike at home, my research budget covers the water bill.<\/p>\n

Completing the scene are nearly a hundred wires that snake from several control boxes into every tank. Attached to these wires are a myriad of scientific instruments, buried in the soil. These are enough to keep even the geekiest scientist happy. They allow me to measure everything about the soil that a rice plant might possibly care about, from the amount of water present to the oxygen available. Being able to make all these measurement is part of the power of international collaboration in a project like RECIRCULATE<\/a>.\u00a0 Our precisely controlled environment here in Lancaster allows us to make many measurements that are essentially impossible in the variable and unpredictable conditions of a field experiment.\u00a0 On the other hand, however hard we try, we can never fully simulate a rice crop actually growing in Ghana or Nigeria. It\u2019s by working together- bringing together these different research capacities- that we can make real progress.<\/p>\n

What unites my work with the African field trials is our shared aim of developing new techniques for growing rice<\/a> suitable for an African environment. The scale of what we do is different, but the approaches are the same, and by working together we are making progress towards new ways of growing rice with less water. Others RECIRCULATE stories have explained that in detail. So I\u2019ll finish by thinking about the next chapter in \u201cmy story\u201d.\u00a0 I joined RECIRCULATE just before the pandemic started, so I can\u2019t wait to visit our partners to work with them on their field sites, as others have throughout the project<\/a>.\u00a0 That\u2019s an amazing opportunity for a UK-based early-career researcher like me. Of course, I want to welcome my colleagues from Ghana, Nigeria and beyond back to Lancaster as well. I can\u2019t promise them good weather- but at least I can offer one small corner that might make them feel at home. Just like my rice plants!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/td>\nDr Ryan Edge<\/strong> is an agronomist working at Lancaster University and is a Post-Doctoral researcher in the RECIRCULATE project. Ryan has a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has a varied research background but is primarily interested in understanding how plants react to environmental stress.<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

 <\/p>\n

All articles in The FLOW<\/strong> are published under a Creative Commons \u2014 Attribution\/No derivatives license,<\/a> for details please read the RECIRCULATE re-publishing guidelines<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RECIRCULATE post-doc Ryan Edge shares the joys and challenges of growing rice at 55\u00b0N Have you been enjoying the blogs in The FLOW?\u00a0 I certainly have, they have helped me see the \u2018bigger picture\u2019 of all we are doing in the GCRF-funded RECIRCULATE project. I know that\u2019s one aim of The FLOW- to share our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1342,"featured_media":3515,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-flow","category-wp3"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/files\/2020\/10\/Lab-Ryan-Edge.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9hFf1-UF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1342"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3513"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3638,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3513\/revisions\/3638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}