The closure of a flagship crop productivity project has been branded ‘nothing short of a national scandal’, with calls for levy organisation AHDB to step in and save it.
Agricultural consultancy ADAS confirmed it is winding down its Yield Enhancement Network (YEN) for cereals and oilseeds after 13 years due to a lack of sponsorship.
The project, which benchmarked crop performance and shared data across the industry, has been credited with driving improvements in farm productivity.
Describing the decision as “nothing short of a national scandal”, former AHDB board member and Yorkshire farmer, Paul Temple, said AHDB should intervene to safeguard the programme and preserve its extensive dataset.
He said levy-payers in the cropping sector had “a very simple need: to turn around a 15-year productivity decline and close the widening yield gap in our major arable crops.”
Writing for Science for Sustainable Agriculture, he added: “Using levy funds to subsidise work for niche practices and markets is not [AHDB’s] primary purpose.”
He argued that AHDB’s future income also depends on raising production levels, since its funding is linked to the volume of crops sold off British farms.
One of the first AHDB projects announced under new chair Emily Norton is a three-year study of winter wheat traits to improve weed competitiveness in organic and low-input systems.
AHDB said the research will “reduce reliance on herbicides and support the transition to more environmentally friendly agricultural practices.”
But Mr Temple warned the focus was misplaced: “Lower yields are not what UK growers need, and when Defra statistics for 2024 indicate that organic wheat accounted for just 1.3% of the national wheat area, this project represents a serious misuse of levy-payers’ money.”
He pointed out that no UK wheat-breeding companies are partners in the project, which instead involves organic seed specialist Cope Seeds, RSK ADAS and the Organic Research Centre (ORC).
The project coincides with news that ORC has become part of ADAS, although it will continue as a stand-alone business under its own brand.
While organic sector representatives welcomed the merger, Mr Temple expressed concern about its impact on ADAS’s research direction, noting that the ORC website was “peppered with anti-pesticide, anti-GMO, and anti-gene editing blogs.”
“Time will only tell whether, as part of ADAS, the Organic Research Centre’s status as a stand-alone business continues to involve amplifying and promoting the views of NGOs whose outlook is fundamentally opposed to so much of the applied research ADAS is associated with,” he said.
The YEN project has been widely recognised for highlighting the potential to close the gap between average farm yields and what is technically achievable.
YEN founder Professor Roger Sylvester-Bradley said: “The YEN has been a fantastic driving force for arable industry collaboration and has greatly enhanced our understanding of field yield.
“YEN provided us with definitive proof that, with a detail-oriented farming approach, 15 t/ha winter wheat yields are feasible almost anywhere in the UK.”
Mr Temple concluded: “If the government is serious about its commitment that ‘food security is national security’, then optimising output on our most productive farmland should get at least equal billing against the billions spent on counter-productive land-sharing measures.
“As for AHDB, if it prioritises anything with levy-payers’ research funding, then it should be throwing a lifeline to the ADAS YEN programme to safeguard its yield-enhancing insights and data for industry-wide benefit.”