Leading UK scientists have dismissed government plans to provide a UK alternative to the EU’s €95bn research and innovation programme, Horizon, saying that being a member of a major international programme is essential to the country’s future.

Last week, in an attempt to reassure the science sector, the government announced plans to set up a £14bn post-Brexit alternative to the UK’s membership of Horizon, which would come into operation if ministers could not agree on the terms of an “associate membership” of the EU scheme with Brussels.

Currently, negotiations are under way on an associate membership deal, but the main sticking point is how much the UK would have to pay into the seven-year programme to secure participation.

A pioneering low carbon wheat flour to be used in the production of bread and other staple foods is being jointly developed by German agricultural trading company AGRAVIS Raiffeisen AG, Dutch fertilizer manufacturer OCI Global, and Dossche Mills, a leading manufacturer and supplier of raw materials for bakeries.

The wheat is already growing in fields in Germany and will be harvested in summer 2023. This means that the lower carbon flour can be distributed to food manufacturers at the end of 2023 and early 2024.

The flour is made from wheat grown with OCI's lower carbon Nutramon fertilizer. Compared to conventional fertilizers, this has a lower greenhouse gas balance up to a 50% reduction (cradle-to-gate). The lower carbon fertilizer is linked to biomethane derived from agricultural waste and residue streams as an alternative for natural gas.

A new project aims to tackle the lack of seasonal labour in the UK horticulture industry as researchers look to accelerate the delivery of robotic crop systems.

Agri-OpenCore aims to slash the time and cost of developing a robotic harvesting system that achieves parity with human picking. As part of it, researchers want to develop commercial systems for tomato and strawberry harvesting that achieve human-picking-cost-parity in two years.

There is currently no robotic harvesting system that can match the speed of human picking. It comes as many crops have gone unpicked this year, leading to large amounts of unnecessary waste.

England is not ready for the unavoidable impacts of global warming, the government's advisers on climate change say in a new report.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) said the government hasn't achieved any of its targets and needed a policy "step change" to avoid loss of life.

The CCC reviews the government's adaptation plans - preparations to cope with the effects of global warming. The government said it would take the recommendations into account.

Three cutting-edge projects will receive a share of over £9 million in funding to carry out research and development on proposals to boost farming productivity.

The funding will support projects developing robotic crop harvesting for horticulture and an autonomous system to change cows’ bedding to improve productivity. The funding, announced by Defra, will also go toward a more environmentally-friendly approach to potato cultivation.

The three projects are being supported through the Large R&D Partnership competition, which is part of the government’s £270m Farming Innovation Programme.

Farmers are one step closer to tapping into gene editing technology, after the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act has made its way through Parliament.

The Act will remove precision bred, or ‘gene edited’, products from the scope of GMO legislation, bringing rules in line with other countries around the world, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Brazil and Argentina.

The British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB) has hailed the announcement as hugely significant for Britain’s plant breeders, because it is the first time in more than two decades that regulations have been brought forward which seek to enable and support the use of genetic innovation in agriculture.

The UK government’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill is set to receive royal assent, the final step towards the new legislation on gene editing.

The bill has passed through both houses of parliament and it will soon be signed into law. A date for royal assent is yet to be scheduled, but Farmers Weekly understands this is only weeks away.

Outside of the EU’s rules on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), it aims to develop a new legislative framework in England for products developed through new plant breeding techniques, such as gene editing.

A new whitepaper has outlined the 'urgent need' for standardised tools and metrics to support the ruminant livestock sector in the UK to reach net zero.

Six priority recommendations in EIT Food's report include promoting regenerative agriculture strategies and rewarding farmers who support the transition to net zero.

Priority recommendations [also] include the urgent need for an internationally agreed and standardised measurement system to monitor the sector's GHGs, so that the effects of any changes or interventions can be monitored and verified over time.

Farm leader Minette Batters has criticised Defra’s Environmental Land Management scheme for farmers in England, arguing that it is not supported by science.

The NFU president delivered her damning verdict on Environmental Land Management (ELM) at Reading University during a speech on balancing net zero with food security. She questioned how the UK government could drive a new policy without scientific rigour.

Mrs Batters suggested the UK government should have involved the country’s best scientists in the design of ELM, including our world-leading, science-based agricultural research institutes, such as Rothamsted Research and Niab.

Parts of Britain's landscape today would be unrecognisable to someone who grew up just 70 years ago, a major survey of plant life suggests.

Non-native species have thrived while some native plants have been hit by modern agriculture and climate change.

In a 20-year study, botanists counted more non-native than native species in the wild. Thousands of volunteers counted millions of flora to produce a Plant Atlas covering the UK and Ireland.