The grass is always greener...

A new test facility at the IGER will help scientists develop the next generation of grassland crop that will balance nutrition and economics with the need to protect the environment

The new Plant Growth Controlled Environment Test Facility at Aberystwyth’s Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) represents a significant investment of £1.0M by the UK Government's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and is pivotal to IGER’s role as a leading centre worldwide for research on grassland based livestock agriculture.

IGER is the major publicly funded institute in the UK for research on grassland agriculture and agri-environment relationships. With a staff complement of 330, IGER has its headquarters and largest research site at Aberystwyth, with further research sites near Okehampton, at Trawsgoed near Aberystwyth and Bronydd Mawr near Brecon.

IGER performs research on breeding forage crops, oats and energy crops including miscanthus and willow and breeding programmes are underpinned by detailed studies on their physiology and molecular genetics. There are animal nutritionists working at IGER providing an important interaction between the scientists understanding ruminant nutrition and those breeding forage crops with enhanced nutritional quality.

There is an important environmental component to IGER's research, in terms of reducing pollution of water courses from fertiliser derived nutrients, and managing farm wastes to reduce pollution of atmosphere and water. Improving the biodiversity (wildflower) of pastures is now seen as an important research objective. IGER also works on modelling climate change impacts on agriculture and developing research (e.g. grass breeding) priorities to match global warming scenarios.

Test facility helps develop sustainable grasses
The new Plant Growth Controlled Environment Test Facility at IGER is playing a key role in the development of new, sustainable, grass varieties capable of providing high quality animal feed. Designed, manufactured and installed by Weiss Gallenkamp of Loughborough, the new facility houses six high specification plant growth rooms and eight large capacity cabinets that can be programmed for a wide range of simulated growing conditions. A major objective is to produce grass varieties of high quality that are economic to produce.

However, grasslands of the future must balance these requirements with the need to protect the soil, sustain wildlife and maintain the appeal of the landscape. “The emphasis is on breeding environmentally-friendly crops that are drought and cold tolerant, need less fertilizer and cause less pollution, while still providing healthy and natural food for livestock,” says Dr Mike Humphreys, team leader of Grass Traits and Varieties Programme at IGER.

“This new facility allows us to simulate the growing conditions of grasses from the most northerly tip of Scandinavia to the coldest parts of the Tartra mountains in Poland and the driest regions of France.”  The new Plant Growth Test Facility is pivotal to IGER’s role as a leading centre worldwide for research into the genetics, breeding, physiology, agronomy and ecology of plants and micro-organisms. In this regard the technology provided by Weiss Gallenkamp, is a vital element, as John Toler, Controlled Environment Operations Coordinator at IGER, explains.

“The new facility can be accurately programmed to provide a wide range of simulated growing conditions (+10?C to +35?C). All plant rooms and cabinets have temperature and humidity control, as well as feedback control of lighting intensity, thus ensuring repeatability of all the environmental conditions.”

In fact, one of the plant growth rooms and cabinets was specifically designed by engineers to accommodate cold acclimation tests with an extended temperature range down to +2?C – even with full growth lighting intensity. The novel application of mixed refrigeration technologies allows constant low temperature operation with a distribution within each of the plant growth rooms and cabinets of ±1.0?C.

Light levels of 1200 micromol m-2s-1 (100,000 lux) can be maintained, even at temperatures close to freezing (although operationally, lower light levels are used normally). However, this did initially present Weiss Gallenkamp with a difficult challenge, due to the fact that the temperature-dependent luminous output characteristic of fluorescent lamps falls dramatically as the temperature is reduced. The solution involved separating the lamp system from the growing area by means of a transparent screen and regulating the temperature and light intensity of the lamps themselves, thereby ensuring that they remain at the optimum temperature for the required light output.

Through the adoption of energy efficient lighting and the latest control technology all Weiss Gallenkamp Fitotron series plant rooms and cabinets now offer, 25% greater energy efficiency, longer lamp life and true “dawn to dusk” simulation.

The technology has already contributed to the successful use of hybrids developed in order to combine useful traits from two grass genera. These are Lolium (ryegrass) species, considered the ideal grasses for agriculture in Europe, and closely related Festuca (fescue) species which typically are more resilient against summer and winter stresses. “What we didn’t know until very recently is one of the reasons why Festuca is winter hardy while Lolium is winter susceptible,” says Dr Mike Humphreys. “What we have now been able to do, in a faster and more targeted way, is to simulate the exact cold temperatures in the new facility and study changes in gene activity under given conditions. We have been able to show that Festuca has a way of accepting excess light energy, which grasses encounter as growth rate declines in the autumn, and lose this energy as heat. We have been able at IGER to transfer successfully this mechanism from Festuca pratensis (meadow fescue) into two different Lolium species and monitor after 2 weeks of cold acclimation how this gene transfer has led to an enhanced freezing tolerance in Lolium.”    

By Alan Norgate