Members:

• ER:
• PhD students:
• Technician:

Principal Investigator: John Hammond

Research goals

The Department of Crop Science at Reading, is home to some of the UK’s leading crop research facilities in the university sector; covering all aspects of the plant-based food chain, with wide-ranging areas of expertise in: plant physiology, crop modelling, crop agronomy, horticulture, plant breeding and molecular genetics, seed science and plant pathology. Our research focuses on mitigating environmental impacts of cropping by improving primary productivity, maximising resource-use efficiencies and minimising crop protection inputs, optimising the societal benefits of plant-based food production by improving product quality and nutritional benefits and increasing the resilience of cropping systems to future changes in climate.

Facilities:

The Crops Research Unit at UREAD is research platform equipped to prepare, drill, maintain, monitor, and harvest arable crops at plot to field scale, with over 2,000 trial plots drilled annually. These include long term trials investigating the intensity of arable rotations, cover crops, diverse leys and low input systems. It has adopted and developed remote/automated phenotyping systems to allow measurement of establishment, light interception, leaf area, height etc. on thousands of plots, measured using RGB imagery. Post-harvest, the CRU contains the facilities to evaluate harvested crops and assess grain quality. This includes grain milling, high-specification laboratory grade NIRs analyser and C, N and S analysis by combustion.

The Crop and Environment Laboratory (CEL) is a dedicated complex that offers a broad range of facilities and support services for research into plant and environmental science, with the control of various environmental variables, including: temperature, light intensity and quality, day length, relative humidity, irrigation, nutrient availability, and CO2 concentration. These include 12x matched Weiss-Technik Fitotron cabinets with full temp, light, day length, RH and CO2 control, 6x Weiss walk-in growth rooms with temp, day length control and factorial glasshouses with automated irrigation systems, heating (25 degrees uplift), supplementary lighting and day length control garages.

These facilities are supported by the wider University provision of analytical equipment, including NMR, ICP, Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer, MALDI and Micro TOF MS, GCMS, LCMS, FTIR, and optical and electron microscopy.

Images of CEL