Data recording at the Centre for Sustainable Cropping (CSC; www.CSC.hutton.ac.uk), a long-term platform now entering its 16th year, is on-going. In 2025, new effort will see nitrogen-blades’ from PBL Technology will be deployed to continuously monitor soil nitrogen losses at CSC, including during and after the deployment of legume crops.
Historic data from the CSC was used for a 'life cycle assessment' (LCA) of field bean supported barley cropping. The LCA approach, commonly deployed in other sectors of the economy to ensure continuous efficiency improvements and improve commercial competitiveness, has not yet been developed extensively or used routinely for cropped systems in the UK. Nevertheless, research by the NCS project found that spring field beans significantly lower the environmental impacts of the following spring barley crop, and allowed an average barley yield-uplift of 1.2 t/ha above spring-barley to spring-barley crop sequences. Similar yield uplifts have been highlighted for wheat by the Pulse YENs, at a average uplift of 0.9 t/ha. This benefit is not simply due to residual field bean nitrogen, and enhancements to soil qualities need better understood, and quantified.
Research for 2025 now seeks to develop the novel “CropGOBLIN” model, a land-use risk assessment tool which will measure environmental impact reductions that are possible by up-scaling field bean production nationally in existing UK production centres; and using scenarios where increases reach up to 20% of the crop rotation annually.
Furthermore, the efforts of the NCS project will be allied to the efforts of complement projects including from www.legumES-project.eu, to elaborate further on options to lower synthetic fertiliser nitrogen application in crops following field beans. Also, a PGRO-supported Collaborative Training Partnership (CTP) for 'Sustainable Agricultural Innovation' led by NIAB, and co-funded by BBSRC. This PhD seeks to assess the yield potential in terms of protein from whole-crop- and grain-harvests, plus follow-on crop benefits, of pea/field bean intercropping.
