Why would a researcher choose to go to Rothamsted rather than into a more traditional university setting?

We have about 70 doctoral students at any one time, which gives it the feel of a university. And then it offers copious advantages above and beyond universities. A lot of our research, for instance, exists on a much longer time scale than can be done in universities. We have continuity of funding and of staff, so experiments can go on longer than the usual three years. Also we have very good service facilities. We have, for example, top-class statistical advisors, who consult on research. You don’t get that kind of support at most universities. And we are in the process of having a major capital investment, $31 million, to make us even more competitive. This will go towards a new laboratory, opening in September, for about 250 scientists, and state-of-the-art greenhouse and insect-rearing facilities. We’re also building a bio-imaging suite that we think is going to be the best of its kind in the country. Once the new building is open, our total staff will include some 500 researchers. That includes not only our main Rothamsted site, but also a field station in the east of the country, which works specifically on sugar beets. And we also have experimental farms next to the laboratories that are a great resource for testing theories in the field straightaway.

It’s hard to say for sure. Certainly one factor that has changed recently is we have done a lot of work in genetically modified crops. We have one of the very few publicly funded wheat-transformation laboratories. It turns out that it’s very difficult to do genetic modification of cereal grains. It has gotten easier, but cereal grains are still the most intransigent crops to modify. I think there are only three or four cereal-transformation laboratories around the world and one is here at Rothamsted. Also, our long experience of studying farmland ecology has led us to be one of the foremost groups assessing the environmental impact of GM crops in the UK. That work started roughly 10 years ago but has garnered considerable attention.

We’ve also done a lot of important work on climate change, which is another hot topic these days. For example, we’re modeling how important agricultural soil is as a carbon sink. In Britain, 75% of our land is agricultural land. How we manage that land will have a big impact on what our carbon emissions are. So it’s work going on at Rothamsted—for instance, looking at the potential to use agricultural soil as a carbon sink and the sort of management issues needed to maximize that—that will help us meet long-term climate change targets. We also have a prestigious group looking at behavior-modifying chemicals in insects. Insects tend to use sense of smell to govern behavior; it’s their dominant sensory input. So we have a chemistry group looking specifically at smells insects respond to, and whether we can alter pest or beneficial insect behavior so we can get pest control without using pesticides.

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I would also like to mention that we have world-class researchers looking at pesticide resistance; how and why insects develop pesticides to weed killers, insecticides, and fungicides—what is behind these mechanisms; what you can do to manage your resistance problems. They’re also looking at the molecular level, what the actual molecular mechanisms of resistance are, how these organisms develop the ability to tolerate poisons, and how those mechanisms might be put to use to prevent the development of pesticide resistance.

As I said, we have major restructuring in the process, the main goal of which is to try to foster integration between groups, from genetics and biochemistry right up to studies at the levels of populations and ecosystems. Traditionally, we would have all people working on insects, for example, in one building, all people studying wheats in another. Now, with our new lab getting built, we will have people housed together according to their equipment and technical requirements. So, for example, all molecular biologists, whatever their discipline, will still be using the same research tools and so they’re housed together. We’re going to see a breakdown of these traditional barriers between groups and, we hope, by doing so, we will foster a lot more integration between researchers.

One of our key objectives is to improve sustainable land-management practices. We want to develop farming and land-management practices that maintain productivity whilst minimizing pollution and non-renewable energy demand. A second objective is to deliver new products from plants; for example, plant-derived fine chemicals, nutraceuticals, and biocontrol products for crop protection.

We are having a big debate in Britain at the moment as to what we want to do with our countryside. We have been subsidizing our farmers to produce crops, quite considerably. The question is whether the government wants to do that anymore. Our farmers have huge difficulties competing with, for example, American grains, which can be imported more cheaply. So that has led to a big debate about what we want our countryside to do for us. Do we want heavily intensive farming, which can compete on a world scale, or do we want, at the other extreme, farms that are more wild habitats than anything else? In the United States, farmland is pretty devoid of wildlife but you have huge national parks to serve that purpose. Small countries like us depend on farmland to also host wildlife. So it’s a big debate about what type of farming systems we want to have. Another factor is we have a lot of government support for organic farming. So how does that fit into the equation? I suppose the bigger question is which of these farming systems are we going to move toward in the coming years, or what kind of mixture of these systems do we ideally want?

Rothamsted is doing research to support all these different types of agriculture. We do work on intensive farming, we do work appropriate to low-input farming, and we work on conserving wildlife. There is also an increasing public push for less reliance on polluting and non-renewable resources, and that is a strong drive of our research here as well. This is going to be an interesting period because decisions have to be made about the future of farming in Britain, and Rothamsted should play a critical role.