Perennial cereals could be the way forward for plant breeders

Some of the cash will go towards new research to help reinvigorate the genetic diversity of wheat, including improved resistance to disease and insects, greater tolerance to drought, salt and heat, and enhanced yield. There will also be an investment programme at the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright, investigating economically important vector-borne diseases of livestock, including bluetongue and foot-and-mouth.

A programme led by the Institute of Food Research will use its share of the budget to improve food safety by increasing understanding of the working of the intestinal tract and how food-borne bacteria can cause human disease.

In Scotland, the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh will use its £23m to look at how genomics and genetics can help understand diseases in livestock.

As a spokeswoman for NFU Scotland pointed out: "Animal genetics are the cornerstone of any livestock production system and breeding disease resistance into our livestock offers a real opportunity to improve efficiency at farm level."

We have certainly come a long way since early man first domesticated animals, and, by selective breeding, developed our modern cereals from wild grasses.

Still, as a non-scientist with a life-long experience of hands-on farming, I would like to make a couple of suggestions for plant breeders to consider.

Firstly, it should not be beyond their ability to develop cereals that can fix atmospheric nitrogen in much the same way that legumes and clover do. Instead of farmers spreading expensive nitrogenous fertiliser that uses a lot of gas in its manufacturing process, the crop would utilise the nitrogen freely available in the atmosphere and enrich the soil at the same time.

Secondly, I believe that plant breeders should seriously consider developing perennial strains of cereals. That would allow farmers to sow a cereal crop every six or seven years, or longer, in much the same way that they sow short-term grass leys for fodder, instead of sowing seeds annually.

Apart from the obvious saving in the annual costs of seeds, the biggest advantage of perennial cereals would be that there would be no need to plough and cultivate the land every year.

The plough was arguably man's worst invention. Its purpose is to bury any trash on the surface of the land by inverting it. That involves considerable expense in equipment and fuel, but more importantly, it can do a lot of harm to the soil.

Heavy tractors that pull the plough compact the soil with their wheels. Worse, ploughing can create a plough-pan, an impervious layer caused by the smearing of the ploughshares, that roots find almost impossible to penetrate. To undo much of the compaction caused by tractor wheels, to level furrows and break down clods into a fine seed bed, farmers go to the expense of cultivating the land.

Mother Nature has a kinder approach to the land – she keeps it in perfect fettle by sowing the seeds naturally every year, or she develops perennial species. That way she doesn't waste precious fossil fuel or damage the soil structure.

Recognising the problem, farmers around the world have developed crop husbandry techniques that don't require any cultivations at all, called "no-till", where seeds are sown directly into the soil after spraying the land with weed killers. Those with poorer, stonier soils have developed "min-till" systems, that are much the same as no-till, although there is a very light cultivation to prepare a basic seed bed.

Of course, I realise that asking plant breeders to develop perennial cereals is a bit like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. After all, they would end up selling a fraction of the seed that they currently sell, reaping fewer royalties in the process.

Still, there are many ways to skin a cat, and they would find that farmers would be willing to pay much more for perennial seeds to save on the hassle and hefty costs of traditional cultivations.