Leading UK scientists have dismissed government plans to provide a UK alternative to the EU’s €95bn research and innovation programme, Horizon, saying that being a member of a major international programme is essential to the country’s future.

Last week, in an attempt to reassure the science sector, the government announced plans to set up a £14bn post-Brexit alternative to the UK’s membership of Horizon, which would come into operation if ministers could not agree on the terms of an “associate membership” of the EU scheme with Brussels.

Currently, negotiations are under way on an associate membership deal, but the main sticking point is how much the UK would have to pay into the seven-year programme to secure participation.

A pioneering low carbon wheat flour to be used in the production of bread and other staple foods is being jointly developed by German agricultural trading company AGRAVIS Raiffeisen AG, Dutch fertilizer manufacturer OCI Global, and Dossche Mills, a leading manufacturer and supplier of raw materials for bakeries.

The wheat is already growing in fields in Germany and will be harvested in summer 2023. This means that the lower carbon flour can be distributed to food manufacturers at the end of 2023 and early 2024.

The flour is made from wheat grown with OCI's lower carbon Nutramon fertilizer. Compared to conventional fertilizers, this has a lower greenhouse gas balance up to a 50% reduction (cradle-to-gate). The lower carbon fertilizer is linked to biomethane derived from agricultural waste and residue streams as an alternative for natural gas.

A new project aims to tackle the lack of seasonal labour in the UK horticulture industry as researchers look to accelerate the delivery of robotic crop systems.

Agri-OpenCore aims to slash the time and cost of developing a robotic harvesting system that achieves parity with human picking. As part of it, researchers want to develop commercial systems for tomato and strawberry harvesting that achieve human-picking-cost-parity in two years.

There is currently no robotic harvesting system that can match the speed of human picking. It comes as many crops have gone unpicked this year, leading to large amounts of unnecessary waste.

England is not ready for the unavoidable impacts of global warming, the government's advisers on climate change say in a new report.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) said the government hasn't achieved any of its targets and needed a policy "step change" to avoid loss of life.

The CCC reviews the government's adaptation plans - preparations to cope with the effects of global warming. The government said it would take the recommendations into account.

Three cutting-edge projects will receive a share of over £9 million in funding to carry out research and development on proposals to boost farming productivity.

The funding will support projects developing robotic crop harvesting for horticulture and an autonomous system to change cows’ bedding to improve productivity. The funding, announced by Defra, will also go toward a more environmentally-friendly approach to potato cultivation.

The three projects are being supported through the Large R&D Partnership competition, which is part of the government’s £270m Farming Innovation Programme.

In an unlikely corner of an industrial park in Essex, the UK's biggest vertical farm has opened for business.

Replacing hedgerows and rolling fields are sensors and shelves. Around 105,000 strawberry plants are housed in the 2500m2 warehouse-style building.

A traditional way of growing the normally summer fruit would take more than ten times the size.

Farmers are one step closer to tapping into gene editing technology, after the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act has made its way through Parliament.

The Act will remove precision bred, or ‘gene edited’, products from the scope of GMO legislation, bringing rules in line with other countries around the world, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Brazil and Argentina.

The British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB) has hailed the announcement as hugely significant for Britain’s plant breeders, because it is the first time in more than two decades that regulations have been brought forward which seek to enable and support the use of genetic innovation in agriculture.

Net zero targets must be brought forward by a decade to stop the “climate time bomb", the UN has said at the launch of a major new climate change report.

Rising emissions in recent years mean cuts in the next two decades will have to be more extreme than current plans, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said.

An 80 per cent global reduction in CO2 emissions is needed to limit warming to 1.5C, the upper aim of the Paris Agreement, its new report says.

An eco-friendly weed-killing system which uses electricity instead of harmful chemicals to treat orchards and vineyards is set to go to market after support from Coventry University.

RootWave, founded by Andy Diprose and based in Kineton in South Warwickshire, applies an electrical current to weeds which causes their roots to heat up and die. It avoids the use of conventional herbicides which have a high carbon footprint and can damage the environment.

The inspiration for the company came from Andy’s father, Dr Mike Diprose, who has a PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He demonstrated the effectiveness of the technology in the 1970s – although the procedure was much more expensive at the time.

Researchers have revealed for the first time how a key gene in crops allows them to use their energy more efficiently, which could, in turn, help bolster global food security.

Scientists have discovered a novel regulatory gene that enables corn roots to acquire more water and nutrients, a gene which controls the formation of air spaces among living root tissues.

Replacing a large percentage of root cells with airspaces saves the plant a lot of energy which is otherwise required to feed all these root cells. This makes roots metabolically more efficient, enabling them to use the resources saved to build more roots and explore the soil more effectively and capture more water and nutrients. Led by Penn State University and the University of Nottingham, researchers say this discovery could lead to the breeding of crops that can withstand drought and low-nitrogen soil conditions.

The UK government’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill is set to receive royal assent, the final step towards the new legislation on gene editing.

The bill has passed through both houses of parliament and it will soon be signed into law. A date for royal assent is yet to be scheduled, but Farmers Weekly understands this is only weeks away.

Outside of the EU’s rules on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), it aims to develop a new legislative framework in England for products developed through new plant breeding techniques, such as gene editing.

It might feel wet this week but experts are warning that parts of England need unseasonable rainfall to compensate for an abnormally dry winter.

Rivers in some of England and Wales ran their lowest on record for February, according to data from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. England had its driest February for 30 years, according to the Met Office.

Rivers and reservoirs that supply drinking water and feed crops rely on winter rain to top up before spring.