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NKJ will improve the knowledge about agricultural land as a carbon reservoir. The assignment was given from the Nordic ministers in agriculture and food.​

The Nordic ministers wants agriculture to help decreasing the emissions of climate gases. Therefor they want to increase the knowledge about how to best use the arable land in that purpose. They also see a need to develop models for measuring carbon in arable land. An important issue is to report and use results from research in the development of future policies for society and advice for practitioners.

NKJ got the assignment to lead the work in close cooperation with the Norwegian chairmanship. NKJ is pleased with the assignment and the work starts urgently.

The NKJ board gathered in Stockholm November 6^th to discuss that assignment, but also the coming NKJ calls. Next call will be launched during the autumn and the focus will be digitalization of agriculture. More information will be found on our website, www.nordicagriresearch.org.

The two nextcoming calls was also discussed and the preliminary focuses for them is food safety and animal health.

The chairman of the NKJ board the last four years Jan Svensson, FORMAS, was thanked for his excellent work. Jan Svensson will be replaced at the end of the year by Nina Solhem Flæte from the Research Council of Norway. She comes from the Norwegian Agriculture Agency where she has been a senior advisor, and before that from Norwegian Agricultural Authority and Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

The Swedish market for biological plant protection is too small and needs national support to get access to existing products in other countries.

 

Researchers in Sweden have evaluated several biological plant protection products. They could show that the effect of the products varied – and that the harvest increased in many cases.

The use of biological plant protection increases in many countries and there are expectations that the chemical plant protection will be replaced with biological alternatives. The researchers wanted to increase accessibility for Swedish plant breeders. But they had a hard time even to get permission from the producers to include their products in the evaluation. The reason is that a small market as Sweden isn’t interesting for them.

The conclusion is that there is a need for national support to be able to provide new and environmental friendly plant protection solutions to the Swedish plant breeders.

And there is an obvious need for more alternatives. The chemical plant protection products is phased out of the EU. That means that the risk for resistance increases.

 

Read more at lantbruksforskning.se (text in Swedish)!