Preventing crop pests & plant diseases - Ian Toth 🪲🐛🦗

Globally, we lose tons of crops to pests and diseases: with the growing pressures of population growth and climate change, these issues are going to worsen further. Here, Ian Toth, director for the Scottish Centre of Expertise for Plant Health, examines how we can balance diseases and pests against the environmental impact of agriculture.

Globally, we produce 2.5 billion tonnes of food each year and use half of the world’s habitable land to do so. Even with all this food its distribution is poor, and many people don’t have enough to eat and go hungry, while others eat too much and suffer from obesity. The global population is growing exponentially and is forecast to reach 9 billion in the next 20 years. This will require a major increase in food production requiring more energy, more land and more fresh water, while impacting on biodiversity, soil erosion and the climate. On top of this, the increasing movement of people from rural to urban settlements has led to an increase in wealth and with it a change in eating habits, including our insatiable appetite for meat and animal products. This not only impacts on our health but also wastes a huge amounts of food energy in the conversion of crops to animals. However, by far the biggest energy losses are from the impacts of weeds, pests and diseases on crops themselves. Starting from the first crops to be planted thousands of years ago to the present day, we have battled to try to control these losses. The gradual introduction of resistant crop varieties since the 1850s and use of synthetic pesticides since the 1940s have led to a step change in crop protection and food production. Even so, with a growing focus on the environment and the potential harm that pesticides can do, we need new ways to protect our crops yet still produce more food. Are there more sustainable ways to do this? This presentation will look at some of the current methods being used and conclude with some examples of how researchers at the James Hutton Institute are developing new approaches for the future.

0:00 Introduction to a balanced diet
2:29 The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1848)
4:03 The global picture
6:26 How much farmland is there?
8:38 High versus low intensity farming
9:20 Economics of agriculture
10:09 Global use of crops
11:25 Crop food waste
13:17 Global crop protection
15:22 Pesticides efficiency
17:35 Organic farming isn't always organic
20:04 Crop resistance
20:21 Traditional vs mutation crop breeding
28:18 Biocontrol - using animals to control pests
32:40 The James Hutton Institute
33:31 Vertical farming
34:15 Integrated pest management
39:48 New sources of resistance
40:10 A natural environment
42:02 Scotland's Plant Health Centre
43:12 Ash tree dieback
46:41 Xylella fastidiosa
48:07 Conclusions

Speaker profile: Following a PhD in molecular bacterial plant pathology at the University of Warwick with Prof George Salmond in 1991, Ian Toth went on to undertake a post doc with Prof Liz Wellington at the same university researching soil microbes. He then moved to Copenhagen where he worked at the biotechnology company NovoNordisk before arriving at the Scottish Crop Research Institute in Dundee (now the James Hutton Institute) in 1995. Here he began investigating the bacterial potato pathogen Pectobacterium atrosepticum – the causal agent of blackleg disease. He was involved in the first genome sequence for an enterobacterial plant pathogen and the first to compare the genomes of both plant and human enteric pathogens. More recently, he has studied the spread of the bacteria in the environment and worked closely with industry to find ways to reduce the impact of the disease for growers. Ian’s research has led him to undertake a range of other roles including an honorary Professorship at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. His most recent role is as Director for the Scottish Centre of Expertise for Plant Health where he works with government, industry, public bodies and scientists from a range of different plant sectors (including agriculture, forestry, horticulture and environment), and has become involved in committees such as the UK Science Partnership for Animal and Plant Health.

Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2019.