Review

The first two weeks flew by at Elm Farm. We had good weather for almost the whole time. This was good when we had excursions (probably not the drive) and sometimes it was used in our free time for long hiking trips on the wonderful public footpath system in the UK. Because the cooking facilities in Elm farm were great, most of the bread we ate was made by one of the students from COA. If the discussion finished in time, one of us was so enthusiastic to prepare a lunch for everyone Sometimes this was not the case, when the presentations went on and finally was cut off by Roger. In the second week we had the session of Andrew Wheatley (author of Bread Matters) focused on the processing of bread, about the quality aspects and the different components of bread and additives that are used to increase the „freshness“. Now almost everybody is afraid to eat standardized toast bread that stays fresh for longer than it should be. Other scary bread we found was crustless toast bread for those who don’t like the crust.
On Monday after our experience with a sterile travel lodge, we went to John Innes Centre for plant breeding in Norwich. This was a really interesting excursion; we got to know a little about their current breeding programmes. John Innes Centre focuses their research programs mainly on wheat, other temperate cereals and Brassicaceae. We learned about crossing techniques in wheat including breeding with wild and ancestral relatives of wheat. This backcrossing is for disease resistance, and environmental impacts like salt and drought tolerance. These factors are dependent on more than one gene, so they are not easy to solve by genetic engineering, the same thing is for yield increase that is dependent on more than one gene, but information on the flyer is positive about genetic engineering in sustainable agriculture.
In John Innes Centre we also had a look in the seed bank and we saw many different varieties (seeds) of wheat barley, oats, peas. After that we went to the field plots, where different wheat varieties were grown and were harvested with a mini combine. There are just a few days left in the UK, but we will enjoy the last few days and also our stay in the beautiful old farmhouse near Stowmarket.