A type of wrinkled ‘super pea’ may help control blood sugar levels and could reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, suggests a new study.

The research, from scientists at Imperial College London, the John Innes Centre, Quadram Institute Bioscience and University of Glasgow, suggests incorporating the peas into foods, in the form of whole pea seeds or flour, may help tackle the global type 2 diabetes epidemic.

The work, published in the journal Nature Food and funded by the BBSRC, focused on a naturally occurring type of pea. Unlike regular (smooth) peas, they contain higher amounts of ‘resistant starch’, which takes longer for the body to break down.

The International Wheat Yield Partnership (IWYP) has launched its European Winter Wheat Hub which aims to accelerate research discoveries from the UK and globally into commercial plant breeding.

The hub will combine novel traits discovered by collaborative international teams into a range of high performing European winter wheat genetic backgrounds for assessment and use in winter wheat breeding programmes.

BASF, KWS, RAGT and Syngenta have entered a collaboration with NIAB to provide a translational pipeline supporting European winter wheat improvement.

British scientists are using cryotechnology that will keep key UK crops secure at very cold temperatures in a bid to improve sustainability and yield.

The UK Crop Microbiome Cryobank will facilitate the sustainable yield improvement of six major crops including barley, oats, oilseed rape, potato, sugar beet and wheat.

The five-year project is being spearheaded by CABI, along with researchers from Rothamsted Research, Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) and the John Innes Centre.

UK farmers should be able to access new crop protection products quicker than their EU counterparts post-Brexit, the chief executive of the Crop Protection Association (CPA) has said.

Dave Bench, who headed up the UK regulatory authority for plant protection products before taking up the reins at the CPA, explained that the UK vastly outperforms other EU member states when it comes to assessing and authorising new substances.

And he pointed out EU farmers would suffer as a result of losing the UK’s regulatory capacity after Brexit, with other member states unwilling to provide the resource necessary to meet legal deadlines for assessing new active substances and reviewing existing ones.

A plan to protect and improve the health of honey bees in England and Wales has been published by Defra and the Welsh Government.

Four key outcomes include effective biosecurity and a good standard of husbandry to minimise pest and disease risk, enhanced skills and production capability, the use of science and evidence to support bee health and increased opportunities for knowledge exchange and partnerships with wider pollinator needs.

Scottish farmers have been told they could become the champions rather than villains of climate change if prepared to follow a new path of “transformative” measures advocated by an independent group.

The Farming for 1.5°C Inquiry – made up of farmers, scientists and researchers, environmentalists, policy experts and campaigners –has published an interim report it believes will meet the challenge of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, will lead to net-zero for Scottish farming and ensure the future of a robust industry,

The interim report makes it clear success will require more than tinkering at the edges of current support schemes, but rather an ambitious “emissions reduction plus sequestration pathway” which would have targets and whole-farm plans of action for each of the three key greenhouse gases.

A Dutch scientist turned film maker has teamed up with a group of European farmers to produce a crowd-funded documentary film which will dispel the mistruths surrounding glyphosate.

The Glyphosate Chronicles aims to address myths spread by the anti-glyphosate lobby around the safety of the herbicide, its role in sustainable farming and what the consequences of a ban would mean for European agriculture.

Molecular biologist, Hidde Boersma of Sugar Rush Films who is making the documentary said the film will ‘unearth the fraudulent activity, shoddy science, unscrupulous lawyers and hardcore ideological activists which make up the powerful anti-glyphosate lobby.’

Defra’s former chief scientist Professor Ian Boyd has called on Government to spend as much on food research as it does on health research.

Prof Boyd said food was so important to humanity, and so interlinked with public health, that the budgets should be the same. At the moment, the UK’s food research spend stands at less than 10 per cent of the heath research budget.

According to Prof Boyd, the money should be spent on research on three transformative technologies – genetics, robotics and process engineering – in order to boost UK agriculture’s productivity.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB)’s Farm Excellence network will launch its first wave of on-farm carbon footprinting this month.

Chosen to represent a range of regions, systems and sectors, a total of 40 strategic and monitor farms will be the first to be assessed to determine their carbon footprint.

The assessments will be carried out by SAC Consulting and ADAS between November 2020 and March 2021, with results leading to bespoke mitigation measures in detailed carbon action plans.

The sugar industry has submitted an application for emergency authorisation of Cruiser SB (thiamethoxam) as a neonicotinoid seed treatment, to be used to protect the English sugar beet crop in 2021.

This comes as sugar beet growers faced ‘unprecedented’ challenges in 2020 as the impact of virus yellows saw some yields fall by 70 per cent.

European and UK legislation on deforestation is a ‘huge opportunity’ for Brazilian agriculture with the industry confident it can increase production and efficiency without damage to the Amazon.

But industry leaders, speaking at a round-table by Apex-Brasil, the Brazilian trade and investment promotion agency, said communicating its sustainability credentials would be key.

Celso Moretti, president of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), said Brazil had made a ‘fantastic transformation’ over the past 50 years driven by science and technology.

Genome editing techniques that modify the DNA of plants do not pose more hazards than conventional breeding or techniques that introduce new DNA into a plant, an EFSA assessment concludes.

The scientific opinion focuses on plants produced using different genome editing techniques: site-directed nuclease-1 (SDN-1), site-directed nuclease-2 techniques (SDN-2) and oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis (ODM). These differ from site-directed nucleases-3 (SDN-3), which was assessed by EFSA in 2012, because they modify a specific region of the genome without introducing new DNA.