Oxford Farming Conference

  Date: 24th July 2008

"The Council members of the Oxford Farming Conference recently visited the East Malling Research Centre for an extensive update on the R&D currently being undertaken in soft and top fruit. Council members include Christine Tacon, Director of the Co-op Farms and Teresa Wickham, the current Oxford Farming Conference Chairman and advisor to Sainsburys on agricultural and horticultural produce.

Pictured here is Dr Mark Else explaining the work EMR is doing on water use efficiency in UK horticulture. He said "Recent polytunnel experiments in strawberries at EMR [funded by Defra] have shown that effective scheduling can deliver significant water savings without compromising marketable yields or fruit quality. Further improvements in water use efficiency were possible using deficit irrigation where plants were given slightly less water than was lost by transpiration. These technologies are bow being tested in commercial field trials at EMR; the expectation is that there will be improvements in berry flavour, bioactive content and shelf-life potential using three water scheduling programmes. The anticipation is that water use efficiency can be increased by 50%."

Other work communicated during the visit was Jean Fitzgerald's work on sustainable pest control, Angela Berrie's work on zero residue systems in top fruit, Dr Kate Evans' work on molecular markers and DNA fingerprinting in stone and pip fruit which is being increasingly used to identify varietal provenance, Dr Neil Hipps' work on reducing fruit and vegetable waste and EMR's Chairman, Oliver Doubleday's update on the resurgence of the UK Cherry industry.