Slug Resistant Wheat – Farming Innovation Programme

Trialling and studying slug-resistant wheat varieties to reduce chemical treatments and address a major pest problem for arable farmers.

The challenge

Slugs are one of arable farming’s biggest pests and left uncontrolled would cost UK farmers around £100m in lost crops¹. The damage to winter-sown cereals is worst in the autumn, with newly planted seed often decimated at a crucial point in its growing cycle.

Despite the devastating damage of these pests, the entire industry relies on just one form of control: molluscicide pellets. Thousands of tonnes of these ferric phosphate pellets are spread every year on UK soils, often as a precaution to protect fragile seedlings, at a cost of around £43m² to UK farmers.

Creating a viable solution

The Slug Resistant Wheat project, brought together by the British On-Farm Innovation Network (BOFIN), is looking to tackle this persistent problem by looking at the palatability of the crop itself and whether an answer could lie in the genetics of wheat crops to make them less desirable to slugs – thereby reducing the widespread impact of this pest.

Scientists have identified a wheat variety, Watkins 788, that has not been grown for almost 100 years and has never before been grown in the UK but had been observed through initial lab trials to be consistently spurned by slugs. Through a combination of further lab tests and field trials the aim is to confirm these observations; while also looking at how the problem of slugs can be tackled through innovation rather than chemical control.

Project scope

Supported by scientists from the John Innes Centre in Norwich and leading entomologist Keith Waters, the project undertook a range of lab-based feeding trials to ascertain the palatability of the Watkins 788 crop among slugs when compared to more common varieties.

In support of this work, a select group of seven farmers from across the UK set aside a small area of their wheat fields to grow this variety alongside their traditional crops. The research team developed a protocol for these farmers to effectively manage the trial conditions, encompassing everything from sowing and harvest dates, to how to effectively measure, monitor and report slug activity and data on its ongoing condition and end-of-trial results. This ensured a consistency throughout the trial to better assess the opportunity in a real-world setting.

Having a farmer-led element has been crucial to the project’s progress, believes Tom Allen-Stevens, Founder of BOFIN: “Gaining the insight of farmers has helped us better understand the challenge they face when it comes to slugs and pest control, which has had a real positive impact on honing the scope of the project and the impact of different issues and conditions. It has also brought valuable additional insight into areas such as growing techniques and the on-field presence and behaviour of species of beetles that feed on slugs, giving us further avenues to consider in the fight against this pest.

“A farmer-fronted project also helped bring a tangible reason for the wider citizen scientist community to become involved. We have had a great response from people of all ages to our ‘Slug Scout’ initiative for the collection of slugs from fields, parks and gardens to be used in the feeding trials. People have really got behind the opportunity to help their local farmers tackle this problem.”

What’s next?

Following completion of the project, the partners are continuing their work to tackle the impact of slugs. This includes the harvesting of the seed from the trial locations, to allow further planting in future, as well as plans for a scientific look at the genomes within the plant to identify the location of interest for future development.

A related project, ‘Strategies Leading to Improved Management and Enhanced Resilience against Slugs’ (SLIMERS), has also since been successful in its funding application, where larger scale on-farm trials are being undertaken in known slug locations to investigate how slugs gather in patches and treatments can be better targeted. Here, novel robots will be sent into fields to identify and treat slugs more accurately with nematodes, a more natural control than traditional pellet methods.

“It’s important that work continues on different aspects of the slug problem between harvests. Identifying slug-resistant properties in wheat varieties is an essential step towards protecting crops in future but will take time. We don’t want to stand still now progress has been made, and farmers have become engaged in the process and the benefits of innovative on-farm research. With their help, we will continue to hone and improve both the crop variety study and further efforts to control this damaging pest.”