This year marks the 60th anniversary of the official opening of the Crops Research Centre at Oak Park, Co. Carlow.
The ensuing years have seen enormous changes impacting on Irish crop production, many of which were instigated by research carried out at Oak Park.
According to Teagasc research officer, Dr. Richie Hackett, crop production in Ireland 60 years ago was very different to what it is today.
“Spring sown crops predominated. These included spring barley, wheat, oats, sugar beet and potatoes,” he explained.
“Spring barley was the largest crop in Ireland on an area basis. Oats were in steep decline, partly as a result of a reduced requirement for feeding work horses.
“And crop output levels were much lower. Spring barley yields, for example, were typically less than 1t/ha compared to today’s standards of over 7.5t/ha.”
While some herbicides were available for cereals back in 1964, weed control was far more limited than is the case today.
Chemical control of diseases had yet to be introduced on a wide scale and machinery was small by today’s standards, making crop production labour-intensive.
This was particularly evident in sugar beet production where multi-germ seed was the norm. This required manual thinning of the resultant clumps of plants and in many cases manual weeding.
Research at Oak Park
Research at Oak Park in the 1970s and 1980s helped develop production systems that took full advantage of new technologies to improve yields and make production systems less labour-intensive.
“For example, work at Oak Park pioneered the integration of monogerm sugar beet seed and new herbicides,” Hackett explained.
“This removed the need for thinning and manual weeding into far more labour-efficient and higher-yielding systems.”
Meanwhile, in the field of plant pathology research at Oak Park was at the forefront of integrating emerging fungicides into production systems that today allow Irish producers to achieve among the highest yields in the world.
And this is despite having a climate that is conducive to yield-robbing fungal diseases.
As new fungicides were brought to the market, research at Oak Park evaluated their efficacy and identified the most appropriate way to integrate them into disease control programmes.
“A key part of the research at Oak Park has been monitoring the susceptibility of various fungal pathogens to available fungicides,” Richie Hackett confirmed.
“It became clear from an early stage that fungi could evolve to overcome effects of fungicide, thereby rendering a given fungicide less effective.
“This work facilitates better advice to growers regarding the most effective fungicides for a given situation.
“Recently, similar issues have arisen with herbicides, and now herbicide resistance amongst weed populations has become another key research area at Oak Park,” he added.
Plant breeding programmes were established almost immediately at Oak Park, one looking at potatoes, the other focused on the development of improved grass and clover varieties.
“Potato varieties bred at Oak Park are now grown around the world, but perhaps the most recognisable variety grown in Ireland is Rooster,” Hackett continued.
“Initially released to the market in 1991, today it is the most widely grown ware potato in Ireland.
“The forage breeding programme has also been successful, with many varieties of perennial ryegrass and white and red clover released onto the market.”
Increasingly integrating biotechnology into both programmes’ selection process has allowed more precise identification of varieties with the required traits.
As well as optimising the agronomy of established crops such as wheat and barley, considerable effort has been devoted to assessing the potential of new crops.
Forage maize is one such crop; through decades of research and development at Oak Park, it is now commonly grown in Ireland.
“Research has been done on energy crops, such as miscanthus and willow,” Hackett said.
“In addition, the agronomy of legume crops such as beans, peas and lupins has been studied with a view to increasing the amount of home-grown protein produced in Ireland.”