A research team led by Dr Robin Allaby of the School of Life Sciences has found evidence of wheat reaching Britain 2000 years before the arrival of farming in the UK.
This has a significant impact on our understanding of Britain in pre-Neolithic times, indicating that the ancient British were not cut off from mainland Europeans on an isolated island 8,000 years ago as previously thought with the most plausible explanation for the wheat reaching the site being the existence of social and trade networks. It is thought that these networks might have been assisted by land bridges that connected the south east coast of Britain to the European mainland, facilitating exchanges between hunters in Britain and farmers in southern Europe.

Evidence for a variety of wheat known as Einkorn was found from sedimentary DNA at a submerged archaeological site off the south coast of England (picture above by Roland Brookes, The Maritime Archaeology Trust).

The research work was completed in collaboration with co-leads Professor Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford and Professor Mark Pallen of Warwick Medical School, the Maritime Archaeology Trust, the University of Birmingham and the University of St. Andrews.

This research has been published in the academic journal Science, February 2015
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In partnership with the University of Warwick, HDC will fund a new five-year fellowship to train a scientist in plant pathology for the field vegetables sector.

Britain's dairy industry produces around 13.5 billion litres of raw milk each year and uses roughly 13,500 litres of water in the process. In an article for Warwick's Knowledge Centre, Rob Lillywhite from Warwick Crop Centre explains why climate change will throw a greater focus on water footprints in food production.

On Friday 12 August, BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today programme visited the Warwick Crop Centre to find out about research to increase vegetable yields, and quality, in the face of increasing pressures on climate change and food security.

 The programme includes:

• Dr Rosemary Collier investigating sources of resistance to lettuce pests.
• Dr Charlotte Allender discussing the use of carrot diversity sets to look for useful traits such as disease resistance and tolerance to drought.
• Dr Graham Teakle examining nitrogen-use efficiency in oil seed rape.

Listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer