Well, while it seemed to pass with little in the way of any fanfare, the latest update to the national cereals and oilseed recommended list was released this week.

Rated as one of the most useful pieces of work carried out by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), the list will next August celebrate 80 years since the first officially backed catalogue of grain varieties’ performance was drawn up - by the National Institute for Agricultural Botany back then - and published during the latter years of WW2. The aim was to help the country’s farmers pick the best varieties in order to increase production and reduce the reliance on imported grain (I guess back then a bit more than lip service was paid to the whole issue of food security...)

In fact, the recommended list might stand second only to that ‘everyday tale of country folk’, The Archers as the most widely recognised effort to educate farmers and encourage them to adopt more productive practices aimed at increasing the amount of home grown food being produced in this country.

And I think that few of us could say that we haven’t at some time used the list as a starting point for, if not actually choosing a variety, then at least watching out to see what might be coming onto the market shortly - in the way of newcomer varieties with a better yield or, increasingly so in the current economic climate, improved disease resistance and agronomic characteristics.

While the findings of the big review of the Recommended List carried out earlier this year (which basically asked what growers liked/didn’t like about the current format and what changes and additions we would like to see) haven’t all been brought into effect yet, the exercise did get a pretty good number of responses, with somewhere in the region of 700 growers taking the time to add their tuppenceworth on how it should be developed to meet our needs in the future.

This is important as the list, which costs around £3.4 million to produce, sees more than £2 million of this come directly from levy payers, accounting for a fair old proportion of AHDB’s cereal and oilseed sector’s total budget of around £11.3 million.

While the worry about “bloat” with too many varieties appearing on the list has to some extent already been addressed - with a ‘leaner, meaner’ list being produced this year - the increasing importance of inherent pest and disease resistance is likely to figure when the changes and timeframe for delivery of the reforms to be taken forward are revealed later in the winter.

While out-and-out yield always used to be the main consideration in the past, with eyes having to be focused more and more on economic performance as much as yield at any cost, unsurprisingly there has been a call for more detail on how varieties perform under reduced input management systems.

The rising costs of fertilisers, the expense and shrinking armoury of pesticides together with moves towards low and min-till establishment regimes have seen an ask for consideration to be given to factoring these important variables into the list.

Realistically, though, despite the importance of all these issues it would be one hell of an ask to dramatically increase the number of replicated trials which would be required to cover all the permutations covered by such expectations, a fact that the AHDB recognised when I put this to them - so it will be interesting to see just how far they can actually go down this road.

Of course what they come up with for the list will be important, especially in light of the consultation on increasing the levy rates which is likely to see growers paying a fairly substantial rise, with cereals up from 46p per tonne to 58p per tonne for 2024/25 while the levy on oilseeds would increase from 75p per tonne to 94p per tonne, an increase in both cases of around 26%.

Obviously, as in other sectors, there’s likely to be a bit of a kick-back from producers against any increase, and the idea must have been proposed with some trepidation, especially after the bloody nose the organisation received from the potato and horticulture sectors in recent years.

However, this has to be viewed against the fact that it will actually be the first increase in levy rates for more than a decade, a period during which the general rise in inflation together with an unhelpful ruling on the organisation’s VAT status after a challenge by HMRC has seen its effective spending power fall by an estimated 40%.

While initial signs are that there has been what was termed ‘a reluctant acceptance’ from the combining crop sector that some increase will be inevitable, it’s not unreasonable to assume that a bit of ‘quid pro quo’ will be sought regarding the level of service provided.

And I guess there might be a few malting barley growers keen to see some assessment of a variety’s predisposition to skinning after this year’s harvest. For while we all know that the weather – and even the combine settings – can play a big role in the level of skinning, on top of the issue of apparently subjective assessment, some varieties (possibly those with Concerto in their parentage?) do seem to be more prone to this problem.

On the broader front, NFU Scotland certainly called for a greater level of communication and a better transmission of the work that AHDB is doing, to ensure that levy-payers were getting their money’s worth.

“We want to see AHDB use levy funding to undertake greater promotional communications to build its outward facing profile on what our cereal and oilseed members produce. This must include a reworking of the current AHDB website to make it more accessible,” said the union.

Predictably there was also a call for an increase in farmer-led research relevant to growers in Scotland, including new trials for resistant varieties to ensure greater levels of resilience against the challenges of growing in a changing climate.

And, in addition, there was also a demand for more in the way of work on the arable-specific monitor farm programme front in Scotland – for while the current programme might, with its close focus on regenerative measures, be pointing the way towards the future, it would be fair to say that some work on more instantly realisable gains would also be appreciated.

All of which may take us back to the recommended list itself. Because, while we’re always clamouring for newer and better varieties that are cheaper to grow/are higher yielding/offer improved or more resilient quality parameters, we’re always left with the impression that the breeders are pretty slow to answer the call.

While it’s obvious that a variety with characteristics which make it an out-and-out winner will be commercially successful, getting both the evaluation factors and the weighting which they are given on the list right will be crucial in ensuring that we guide breeders down the path to giving us the type of crops we want and need in the years to come.

So, while the list continues to play such a central role we wait with a degree of expectation to see what this now venerable part of the UK’s agricultural extension services can offer for the future. Let’s just hope it can remain more relevant than The Archers…