Potato Review

www.potatoreview.com POTATO REVIEW JULY/AUGUST 2020 23 SUSTAINABILITY “Yield is always king. In many respects though, the more intensive we have become, the more issues we have created.” Mike Harrington, Director, Edaphos A cross industry group recently came together to look at how the potato industry can work together to increase crop yields from existing land in a sustainable way. At a roundtable hosted by Emerald Research, agronomists, growers, scientists and pesticide producers came head-to-head to look at some of the current challenges and to discuss ways to overcome these. In its 2050 forecast, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations predicts that food consumption in the world will increase by 70% while agricultural land will only grow by 10%, so more food will need to be produced from each unit of land. Emerald’s CEO Simon Fox said: “Within our industry, which is the production of food, whether we are in advisory, research or the sharp end of food production, it is all about trying to face those two issues. We need to be increasing food production on a global scale. We need to be producing better quality food that stores well and we need to be wasting less.” Director Owen Jones outlined what he described as the ‘head winds’ that need to be Sustainability solutions Representatives from di erent sectors looked at how the potato industry could play a greater role in sustainable food production for future generations. Stephanie Cornwall reports. faced. ese included yield ceilings, a more violent and unpredictable climate, the need to reduce pressure on the environment / reduce waste, increased disease and pest pressure, a decline in water irrigation and the loss of actives reducing availability of fertilisers and crop protection products. “To me, the 100-year storm is something that is going to happen now every 25 years,” he said, referring to the excessive rainfall seen last season, and the number of elds he had seen under water. He said pests and diseases are also migrating, while crop production has attened over the last couple of decades. Meanwhile, the grower’s ‘toolbox’ was getting smaller, as products containing banned actives were withdrawn from use and the cost of bringing new products to market made it di cult to readily replace these. “ e natural response to this is to think: ‘Let’s look at biologicals’,” said Owen. Mike Harrington, Director of agronomy company Edaphos, said: “Yield is always king. In many respects though, the more intensive we have become, the more issues we have created. What we are also beginning to realise, with some of the biological farmers we are working with, is that the poorer the soil and the farm become, the more ine cient the products used. In some cases we are beginning to feel that some of the insecticides are actually promoting pests rather than controlling them,” he said. “I’ve always felt that the more intensive we have become, the more we have ‘de- natured’ ourselves.” e pressures are created almost by the farming style, he said, stating that the system had worked successfully for many years, ➜