A PROJECT to combat valuable vegetable crops loss in the UK is being helped by a team from Aberystwyth University.

Aberystwyth University’s Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences is a lead partner in the five-year project looking at losses of oil seed rape and Brassica crops, which have a combined UK market value in excess of a billion.

The crops suffer annual losses of up to £230m, primarily due to increasingly unfavourable and unpredictable weather patterns.

The Brassica Rapeseed and Vegetable Optimisation programme, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, aims to combat these crop losses by unravelling the processes that control key aspects of plant development.

This knowledge will then be applied to help develop new, more resilient varieties of Brassica crops that can achieve superior field performance whilst reducing yield loss and industry wastage.

The BRAVO project, led by Prof Lars Østergaard of the John Innes Centre, brings together the expertise of leading UK plant scientists from three research institutes, JIC, Rothamsted Research and IBERS, and the universities of Nottingham, Bath, Warwick and York.

They will be collaborating with representatives from the oil seed and horticultural industries.

Prof John Doonan, director of the BBSRC-funded National Plant Phenomics Centre at IBERS, said: “Producers need improved resilience to adverse environmental conditions to cope with the combination of climatic variability and the increasingly stringent delivery time and quality requirements imposed by the food industry. 

“IBERS will apply state of the art bio-medical imaging and computer-vision approaches to reveal and exploit the diversity available in these crops, making the food supply chain more efficient and robust.”