Switzerland has rejected proposals that would have made it the first European country to ban the use of synthetic pesticides in agriculture. The provisional results of a nationwide referendum on Sunday (13 June) revealed that 60.6% of voters rejected proposals to outlaw artificial pesticides.

The initiative – For a Switzerland free from synthetic pesticides – was launched by Future 3, a citizens’ group led by a vinter and a soil biology professor from Neuchatel University. It had sought a domestic ban within 10 years, and a ban on imports of food crops grown using such pesticides.

Space technology has helped create a new interactive map breaking down agricultural land use in Scotland. Crops in every field farmed have been recorded by satellite imagery from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Copernicus Satellite Programme.

The Scottish Crop Map uses data from 2019 to predict the crop types using radar images and to recognise the crops growing in nearly 400,000 fields in Scotland. The map has been developed by the Scottish government working in collaboration with EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.

Scientists have refined a transformational process that allows nitrate to be captured from drinking water for use in agriculture as a liquid fertiliser.

The NTPlus project, focuses on how nitrates can be efficiently removed from drinking water for use as a resource, rather than disposal as a waste.

In doing so, this can decrease agriculture’s dependence on the carbon-intensive Haber-Bosch and Mannheim fertiliser manufacturing processes.

A new project is looking at how machine learning could help predict the intakes of dairy cows - a key research objective for many years.

Scientists in the UK are examining a 'precision feeding' approach for dairy cows as part of a new machine learning project.

Being able to improve the accuracy to predict the intakes of dairy cows, either for the whole herd or for individual cows, has been a key research objective for years.

Leading scientific experts are calling for governments around the world to come together and fund a new international research platform, to reduce the impact of major wheat pathogens and improve global food security.

The John Innes Centre is calling for an internationally coordinated approach to deliver a new ‘R-Gene Atlas’, which would help identify new genetic solutions conferring disease resistance for crops that could be bred into commercial wheat varieties.

Globally, we lose one fifth of the projected wheat yield annually to pests and pathogens totalling losses of 209 million tonnes, worth £22 billion, according to JIC.

The government has today responded to its consultation on the future bovine TB (bTB) strategy and confirmed it will no longer license new intensive badger culls after 2022, alongside shortening and restricting supplementary badger cull licensing.

The NFU does not support the measures because it goes against the science and evidence, which shows badger culling is an effective measure to control the spread of bTB, alongside other controls.

The Prince of Wales has called for small family farmers in the UK and across the world to come together in a cooperative movement using sustainable farming methods, and for their plight to be at the centre of environmental action.

Small farmers, in the UK and EU, are facing their biggest upheavals in more than a generation, with the loss of farm subsidies and new post-Brexit trade deals in the UK, and sweeping reforms to the EU’s common agricultural policy to be announced this week in Brussels.

Plant breeding has a pivotal contribution to make for sustainable agriculture across Europe in the coming years as pressure ramps up to reduce chemical inputs, a major new report has claimed.

The 327-page report, released in Brussels by independent scientific consultancy HFFA Research, concludes that innovation in European plant breeding has also contributed significantly to wider socio-economic and environmental goals such as improved farm incomes, food price stability, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and conservation of key natural resources such as land, water and biodiversity.

Researchers in the UK have applied to the government for a licence to carry out field trials of gene edited (GE) wheat. The plan is for a five-year project ending in 2026, with plants being sown in September or October each year and harvested the following September.

This application follows previous GM wheat and camelina trials carried out by Rothamsted Research across two sites in Hertfordshire and Suffolk over the last 10 years.

The new project involves wheat in which the concentration of an amino acid called asparagine has been reduced in the grain using CRISPR, a GE technique

British scientists have engineered beans that could use up to 40% less water and are able to grow better in droughty conditions.

The team of researchers working at the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food said it was a “huge step forward” in the search for climate-resilient crops.

The Pod Yield Project examined the differences between the common bean and the tepary bean, a variety which has been naturally grown in Mesoamerica and Mexico for thousands of years.