Future funding certainty is critical to UK livestock farmers as they consider increased investment in technologies that have the potential to improve productivity and boost growth, a think-tank has warned.

Precision farming tools, such as electronic ID tags, monitoring collars and farm management apps, could help close the agricultural productivity gap between the UK and countries like Australia and the US.

Agricultural productivity is a focus for the government’s growth plan, with ministers promising imminent action to make farmers more efficient. Yet in new research based on interviews with UK farmers, the Social Market Foundation (SMF) found that many are holding off on spending money to modernise their operations due to uncertainty over new post-Brexit funding streams.

Preliminary results from Europe’s first field trials of gene-edited (GE) wheat have indicated there’s no yield or other agronomic penalty from the precision-breeding technique.

This means that precise edits can now be made to a wheat genome to improve its performance and specific grain qualities that currently take many years to change using conventional breeding techniques.

“This has been the first real test of the technology in wheat in the field in Europe, and it’s a very significant finding,” notes Nigel Halford, whose team at Rothamsted Research carried out the landmark trials.

The public has called for the government to take a cautious approach to introducing gene editing in the livestock sector. The government’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill, which paves the way for the use of the technology in England, is currently progressing through parliament.

In a bid to help shape the policy, members of the public were invited by scientific researchers to share views with experts in dialogue sessions. Overall, the participants wanted a wider public debate on gene editing.

They expressed a need for greater clarity on the government’s overall plan for food and farming to help them understand how the new technology fitted in, its impacts, and what was the potential value of animal gene editing.

Crops are increasingly being eaten by insects because of manmade climate change, according to new research. The phenomenon is occurring despite declining populations of caterpillars, beetles, grasshoppers and other critters.

Plants are around a quarter more likely to be damaged than specimens collected just over a century ago. Burning of fossil fuels, urbanisation and the introduction of invasive species are being blamed.

The shock finding is based on an analysis of leaves dating back 67 million years – just before the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. It has implications for feeding the world. The global population will reach nearly 10 billion by 2050.

The Scottish Government’s Agriculture Bill consultation – widely criticised for its lack of detail – has at last found partial favour with one organisation.

However, while the British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB) has welcomed the Bill’s focus on plant genetics, it has added its voice to growing calls for the government to change its stance on gene editing.

The Scottish Government continues to voice its opposition to the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill going through Westminster. The legislation will exempt plant varieties developed using advanced breeding technologies such as gene editing from current Genetic Modification (GM) rules, and instead regulate them in the same way as conventional varieties.

Climate change, food insecurity and seasonal shortages have triggered calls to loosen regulation for genetically-modified food and seed technologies in the EU.

"We can help farmers by using innovation," the Czech Republic agriculture minister Zdeněk Nekula, whose country currently holds the rotating EU Council presidency, said in a press conference on Friday (16 September). Nekula said new so-called genomic techniques can help make crops more resilient to drought, frost, diseases and pests.

"These solutions aren't expensive and they don't require investment worth billions. We only need to modify the old legislative framework, [to support] regulating modern breeding techniques," he added. "We need modern rules that will make sure that our production is safe and environmentally sustainable," he said, calling current genetically-modified organism (GMO) rules a "limitation" for European farmers that are causing a brain drain to countries outside of the bloc.

The EU is delaying plans to halve the use of pesticides over fears the move could cut food production and raise prices of critical products in the bloc.

The Sustainable Use of Pesticides regulation intends to reduce the amount of chemicals deployed by 50 per cent by 2030 but an impact assessment said its implementation would likely reduce production.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has increased energy costs for food producers and cut imports from those countries of grains and other products.

Bill Gates says the global hunger crisis is so immense that food aid cannot fully address the problem. What’s also needed, Gates argues, are the kinds of innovations in farming technology that he has long funded to try to reverse the crisis documented in a report released Tuesday by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates points, in particular, to a breakthrough he calls “magic seeds,” crops engineered to adapt to climate change and resist agricultural pests. The Gates Foundation on Tuesday also released a map that models how climate change will likely affect growing conditions for crops in various countries to highlight the urgent need for action.

A cross-party group of MPs has viewed on-farm technology capable of slashing methane and ammonia emissions from stored slurry. The Environmental Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) committee MPs visited Holly Green Farm, near Prince’s Risborough, Bedfordshire, on 8 September as part of an ongoing food security inquiry. The farm is run by the Dyson family who milk 500 Holsteins and adopted the technology to help meet net-zero targets and reduce odours during slurry spreading.

Supplied by Danish firm N2 Applied, the treatment unit was installed in the spring of 2021. The equipment is housed in a converted shipping container and uses power drawn from solar panels. Manure is put into the unit where an electrical current is applied. This creates reactive nitrogen that is then pumped back into the slurry store. The process drops the pH and cuts the release of ammonia and methane from the slurry by 98%.

Scientists at Carlsberg Research Laboratory have invented an ultra-fast breeding technology for crops, which the brewer says will pave the way for crops of the future.

The GMO breeding method FIND-IT (Fast Identification of Nucleotide variants by droplet DigITal PCR) is expected to enhance yields, climate tolerance and quality of crops.

The research was published in the latest issue of Science Advances, Carlsberg added.