The School of Sustainable Food and Farming supported a benchmarking activity looking at the sustainability of on-farm crop protection using pesticide metrics. The study aimed to identify which pesticide metric is best suited to UK arable crops, before using this to calculate a sustainability value for crops of wheat, oilseed rape and winter barley at the Harper Adams University farm.
“This project provides a platform for further development of pesticide metrics to measure crop protection sustainability within the UK. At farm level, further work should aim to calculate Pesticide Load values for additional growing seasons at the HAU farm to identify broader trends in crop protection sustainability”
The full research report is available here.