Professor Fiona Doohan:

I am a crop scientist at UCD and I have worked for almost 20 years on crop protection, reducing the amount of yield that we lose because of plant diseases. There is a lot of collaborative research on the island, particularly between UCD and Teagasc. We work to see if we can reduce the yield losses caused by diseases. Although we are very proud in Ireland that the tillage sector rapidly takes up new technologies, and because of that we often have the highest yields in the world year-on-year, the downside is that we have very high inputs. Many of those inputs go towards paying for chemicals to control plant diseases. The situation over the past few years has got a little more alarming because the diversity of chemicals available to control diseases is reducing. This is partly because of EU legislation driven by environmental pressures and also because it is not a constant relationship. The wheat in the field this year will not be the same variety that will be seen in the field in ten years time. It changes all the time because of the dynamic relationship between, mainly, the fungi that cause disease and the wheat crop or the variety. This variety might be resistant to disease for a few years and suddenly it will get higher disease. In the same way as the human flu, plant or crop pathogens evolve.

We work a lot on sustainable crop production, so it is an integrated approach for disease control that involves cultural practices, and farmers have good cultural practices to mitigate against disease, chemical inputs such as fungicides, crop genetics, and neuro-biological control treatments. Crop breeding companies produce these new varieties that are trialled by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine here in Ireland, and are therefore recommended to farmers, and they are continually evolving the stocks that they are producing. We work with them and through the funding we have received from SFI, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and, more recently, the EU, we have gone from very basic research such as that referred to by Professor Doyle through to very applied research where we can say to breeding companies that if they use this piece of DNA, they will have more disease resistance. The bottom line is that it shortens the breeding. If a plant breeding company decides to produce a new variety, it takes it 12 years. We can reduce that time by half with these new biotechnologies. That has been very successful to date and because of research funded by SFI and others in Ireland, we are now rolling out some of those molecular markers to the breeding companies.

Also, recently funding from SFI has put us to the forefront in collaboration with TCD in developing new biological treatments and that is really exciting. It is looking to nature for agents that can control diseases. We develop new environmentally friendly products that can be used to reduce diseases or to help plants face adverse environmental and climatic conditions. More recently, the CONSUS Project, which is an SFI project funded jointly by SFI and Origin Enterprises, is looking at the type of smart technologies that Professor Doyle described earlier. It is combining the smart technologies at the IT level with soil science and biotechnology markers to try to develop a holistic and smart approach to crop production in the future.

Due to Irish funding in crop research, we are to the forefront in Europe in helping companies develop new disease resistant crops. I am glad to say also that, because of the funding from the Government through SFI and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, we were ranked first some years ago out of 1,300 applications for an EU network for innovative and integrative education in crop disease control. These and similar doctoral products in agricultural science are invaluable if we are to train the people who will work to innovate in the tillage sector or in other crop production sectors in the future.

It is timely to discuss climate change and adverse environmental conditions. As we see all over the country, not least yesterday but also in recent and more regular events in Donegal, crops are facing much more adverse environmental conditions. This research has the potential to examine if we can deliver crop varieties that can be harvested earlier or that can be stored in different ways, or alternative crops. That is the next challenge. There is the potential to deliver what I call tailored nutritionally-enhanced non-GM food and feed through research. We have much of the infrastructure and expertise in place to deliver on this potential. Professor Doyle has alluded to IT, and in UCD we are very fortunate to have specialised facilities that are unique globally where we can mimic any potential future climate and test how crop varieties perform under these future climates. We can test if pathogens will evolve, or if diseases will evolve to be much worse in Ireland under what is predicted for Cork, Kerry, Donegal or wherever under future environmental conditions.

There is great potential based on the resources and expertise that we have and, very importantly, the links with industry. Unfortunately, with the exception of potato breeding, there is limited indigenous crop breeding in Ireland. Accordingly, we work with our EU partner companies, particularly in the UK and France, and there is great scope to develop more formal research collaborations with people in those areas to really accelerate the development of new crops, alternative crops, and new varieties of existing crops, such as barley or wheat that are more adapted to the climatic conditions we are facing.

There is also great scope to integrate science and policy in order to promote pan-science research so that we can develop new products that are really enhanced. Some of the buzz words at the moment are "nutritional biomedicine" regarding crop products that are nutritionally enhanced, for example, ideas that there may be particular varieties that could be used to alleviate diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, etc. These are all possibilities that can be looked at and developed through research. There is amazing infrastructure in Ireland because of the funding of research to date. We are reaping the rewards and gaining the benefits from that at the moment, but there is a lot still to be done. There is great potential.