Field Crops wants to do something meaningful for both farmers and society

A year ago, Johan Warringa was appointed as manager of the Field Crops business unit at Wageningen Plant Research. For Warringa, this meant returning to the place where he completed his PhD in Plant Sciences in 1997. After completing his studies, he pursued a career in the vegetable breeding industry, starting out as a research associate and eventually moving into management. Whether working in a commercial setting or in academia, researchers are always deeply passionate about their work, knows Warringa. But working at Field Crops is different from working in industry, he says: “In a company, the focus is on the product and profit. At Field Crops, we are more intrinsically driven to do something meaningful for the sector and for society.”

Which is why he is glad he has made this move a year ago. “At Field Crops, we translate fundamental science into innovations which are applied in arable farming, fruit production and tropical crops. That makes us an interesting knowledge partner for various stakeholders, both at home and abroad. In addition to our main base in Lelystad and the projects we work on with partners on site, we run six field labs across the Netherlands, from the sandy soils of the north, to the clay in the middle and the löss in the south. These locations have been chosen deliberately. Whether you are farming on clay south of Rotterdam or sandy soils in Drenthe, the land dictates what you can grow.”

Climate crisis

Sustainability is top of Warringa’s list of ambitions for the sector in the Netherlands and its neighbouring countries. He notes that this is still sometimes seen as a luxury – a misconception, in his view. “It’s a necessity. We’ve been feeling the effects of the climate crisis for some time. Yields of certain crops are declining - not just in places like southern Europe, but here too. The urgency to improve our sustainability is only increasing. At the same time, I’m seeing support for the current system within society beginning to wane. In the years ahead, I hope to see the sector taking real steps towards more sustainable cultivation and reduces reliance on fossil fuels. It’s up to us to make new sustainable technologies, processes and practical solutions globally applicable.”

“Not this or that, but this and that”

And that’s exactly what Field Crops excels at, he says. “Every year, thousands of growers attend our open days at the field labs. We have 200 colleagues with a wealth of knowledge who are ready to support arable farmers, horticulturalists and fruit growers in becoming more sustainable and improving biodiversity. We advise sector stakeholders on future management systems, crop health, and soil and water quality. We also provide practical support to small-scale vegetable farmers in India and Africa. And we carry out systems research: how crop rotations work over several years, how crops influence each other, and the benefits of green manure. The key principle is that the sector must remain commercially viable. It’s not this or that — it’s this and that.”

For him, the Phytophthora app for potato growers is a good example of a solution which was developed within Field Crops and which has had a big impact. The same applies to Integrated Crop Management, now a key principle for crop health. “Or take the advisory tool we developed for smallholder farmers in Indonesia and Africa and the use of nets and bait sprays against the D. suzukii fruit fly in fruit farming. These are the kinds of solutions we want to continue delivering in the coming years.”

Removing obstacles

Warringa sees it as his task to remove barriers to innovation. “Funding is always a challenge, but there are often other kinds of barriers too. Information-sharing between experts, for instance. Within their own field, people have no trouble connecting, but I believe there’s room for improvement in cross-disciplinary collaboration. I want people to keep an open mind to working together and to actively seek each other out more often — not because I tell them to, but because they want to. I’m not the kind of manager who forces people to do something. I prefer to encourage.”