Earlham Institute (EI, UK) and the Nanjing Agricultural University (NAU, China) establish a long-term partnership to share and develop state-of-the-art resources and expertise in advanced plant phenotyping, Agri-tech innovation and crop research for rice and wheat - funded by the BBSRC International Partnering Award.
Faced with the task of feeding 10 billion people by 2050, modern agriculture is looking to technology to ensure that we can meet the increase in demand for food worldwide. However, there are technical limitations in how much we're able to transfer what happens in the lab to what happens in the field.
To address these challenges, EI and NAU will be sharing their state of the art, innovative Agri-tech technologies, helping to improve crop production and quality through closely monitoring different crop species in fields. EI will provide newly developed crop surveillance robots and machine-learning based analytic software solutions such as CropQuant, SeedGerm and AirSurf. In return, NAU provides large-scale Agri-tech equipment such as LiDAR, hyper-spectral imaging sensors, UAVs and light aircraft.
As part of the award, to which the BBSRC are contributing £30,249 to add to NAU's £124,448, NAU will have access to EI's state of the art genome sequencing platforms, while EI research groups will be able to access and use NAU's wheat germplasm and crop breeding pipelines.
One of the main outcomes of the research will be the co-development of long-term research programmes in crop phenotyping, precision farming, crop genetics and rice and wheat breeding and cultivation; focusing on solving real-world problems in Agri-food and precision agriculture.
This long-term partnership between the UK and China will be enabled through staff exchanges, training events and workshops, which represents an important international collaborative model enabling us to jointly address global challenges in crop growth and development, environmental stresses and disease resistance to benefit the wider scientific community.
Funded by Government, BBSRC invested over £509M in world-class bioscience in 2014-15 and is the leading funder of wheat research in the UK (over £100M investment on UK wheat research in the last 10 years). We support research and training in universities and strategically funded institutes. BBSRC research and the people we fund are helping society to meet major challenges, including food security, green energy and healthier, longer lives. Our investments underpin important UK economic sectors, such as farming, food, industrial biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.