All aboard for the 'Arable experience'

So what better time to share some of my idle speculation during the enforced down-time on the sowing front over the past couple of weeks as I happily (!!!) whiled the days away with a wet hill lambing.

Now, if you’re an out-and-out arable man, it might have escaped your notice, but there’s been a growing trend in the livestock sector to earn some extra cash by offering those less lucky than the farming fraternity the opportunity to share in the joys of lambing.

While such diversifications might have seemed a bit of an outlandish way to boost the farm income in the past, nowadays it seems that almost everyone and their dog is offering an authentic 'lambing experience' – driven, perhaps, by the revelation that one petting zoo has been charging a tenner a head to feed the pet lambs.

However, the ‘nature raw in tooth and claw’ character of our own hill lambing hasn’t tempted me to go down that route.

In years gone by, though, we played host to a procession of vet students over the Easter holiday period as they had to undergo a couple of weeks of lambing as part of their training – and I’m happy to relate that most of them say the recurring nightmares ended eventually.

But for those urbanites who were willing to pay good money for a lambing experience this year, I can’t help but feel that much of the season’s joys could probably have been simulated in their own back garden by getting them to stand in a wet and muddy hole after several nights of sleep deprivation, and then dousing them with buckets of icy water at regular intervals.

For those wishing to revisit their rustic roots, I guess that the trip out into the countryside and the joys of what many still view as the rural idyll probably play an important role in the enjoyment of the whole process.

So, I found myself speculating if there might therefore be an opportunity to offer the urban masses a similar taste of the arable side of things – by offering them a chance to take part in the spring drilling and enjoy an 'arable experience'?

However, looking back at the early part of this year’s sowing season, I would imagine that, for much of the season so far, there might be a limit to the pleasures imparted by endless days spent greasing pto shafts, checking driller coulters and tightening power harrow tines and then, on the basis of a misplaced weather forecaster's sense of humour, hopefully loading up fertiliser and seed only to be disappointed.

All that while watching the rain gauge totaliser nudge ever upwards, leaving the only outlet for growing frustrations the option of pointlessly pacing the fields in a quest to find bits suitable for drilling and praying for some dry weather …

Away from such flights of fancy, though, and moving onto a slightly more serious topic, I was a mite concerned by what was a bit of a sensationalist story that appeared in the recent edition of the scientific journal Nature. Now, while this highly regarded publication might have a bit of a green bent and lean a bit too strongly towards the modish environmental view of things, it’s not normally a periodical associated with a tabloid-type approach.

So, the warning that the next global pandemic to catch the world unawares could take the form of a major threat to world food supplies certainly caught my attention. And, given the fact that it concerned the lightning speed with which a relatively recently identified wheat disease was spreading around the world, I felt I had to read a bit deeper into the story.

Currently threatening the continued cultivation of the crop in many of the poorer areas of the world, ‘wheat blast’ was described as a very serious disease – which it would appear has the rather worrying capacity to move swiftly to some of the world’s major wheat growing areas.

Apparently, the fungus which causes the disease has been around in wild grasses and other plants for many years – but it has now begun to make major encroachment into both wheat and rice crops in some parts of the world, spread in part by the increasing globalisation of the world’s grain seed trade.

First identified in Brazil, in 1985, genomic techniques have been used to show that with seed being widely traded on a global basis, wheat blast has quickly spread across many regions of the world and now poses a significant possible threat to the production of the crop in parts of the world including South America, India, Bangladesh, Zambia and China – and even some parts of the US.

With the disease proving most harmful in warm moist areas of the world, it might not offer a severe threat to producers in Scotland or the rest of the UK, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it had been found to be catastrophic in more tropical wheat growing parts of the world – as its potential to cause yields losses up to a devastating 100% means that it poses a severe threat to food security in affected countries.

Striking at heading time, just as the crop flowers and in the early stages of seed set, the disease can have a dramatic effect on the amount of seed actually set – often leading to completely dead heads, apparently looking a bit like the effects sometimes seen with fusarium head blight.

Ever since the first wheat blast outbreak was recorded, the hunt has been on to identify resistant varieties. But while some varieties initially looked like offering a promising resistance, these broke down even before trials were completed.

So the disastrous effects of wheat blast in the wheat belts of South America, South Asia and Africa are now beginning to put the wind up scientists who are becoming increasingly worried that the speed of spread of the disease in recent years could be a warning bell for Europe.

But while no one is certain if the disease is indeed already knocking on our own back door, it has certainly been recognised that it could easily be spread by the trade in seed, or by human migration.

It’s not all bad news, though, because scientists in the UK, working as part of a multi-national collaboration, have used advanced technologies such as the Ren-Seq genomic technique – which allows scientists to speedily search for useful genes among wild and heritage varieties and wild grass species – to highlight genetics which offer a level of resistance to the disease which is more robust than some of the single gene approach used in the past and which the disease was soon able to overcome.

Researchers say that the method is adaptable enough to find resistance genes which respond to geographically specific strains of the pathogen – and that the search for these resistant genes is urgent because modern wheat varieties haven’t been selected by breeders to include blast resistant genes in their programmes.

Once again, it just shows you how the crop growing sector is increasingly influenced by events in different parts of the globe– and I guess that’s just part of the 'arable experience' too.