Sir,
England’s new precision-breeding regime could materially shorten the time needed to bring useful traits into commercial crop varieties. That is good news for farmers confronting climate change, disease pressure and the continuing need to improve productivity.
England’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 and the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025 now provide an operational regulatory route in England for the release and marketing of precision-bred plants, with release and marketing notices appearing on Defra’s Precision Breeding Register.
One of the great attractions of gene editing is that it can accelerate plant breeding. Traits that might previously have taken many generations of crossing and selection to incorporate can potentially be introduced much more rapidly and precisely.
A faster route to new varieties will achieve little if independent evaluation remains on a timetable designed for a slower breeding cycle. The Recommended Lists are not part of the regulatory approval process. Their importance lies in providing independent evidence that allows farmers and markets to judge whether a new variety is worth adopting.
For decades, independent multi-location trials have allowed farmers to compare varieties using evidence rather than marketing claims. As breeding accelerates, that independent evidence becomes more valuable, not less. The challenge is to make evaluation smarter and faster while retaining its scientific rigour and independence.
We now have the ability to combine decades of field-trial observations with genomics, weather and soils data, artificial intelligence and increasingly precise environmental measurements. Instead of asking simply which variety performed best, we can begin asking which genetics work best, where, why - and what is likely to work next?
For example, with climate change, the variety required in Aberdeenshire in 2040 will not necessarily be the variety required in East Anglia - nor the variety that performed best in either location 20 years earlier.
For Scotland, there is an additional urgency. Precision breeding is a devolved matter and England’s new regime applies in relation to England, while Scotland has not removed precision-bred organisms from the existing GMO regulatory system. Yet, under the UK Internal Market Act, precision-bred food and feed authorised in England can be sold into Scotland, although further processing in Scotland remains subject to GMO legislation. We therefore risk a situation in which Scottish farmers and consumers can access outputs of precision breeding developed elsewhere, while Scotland’s own scientists, breeders and agricultural businesses operate within a more restrictive innovation environment. Scotland should be helping to develop and independently evaluate the genetics required for its own distinctive farming environments, not simply becoming a market for innovation developed elsewhere.
Gene editing potentially adds an important accelerator. Data and AI can identify genetics associated with resilience; precision breeding can create or test that variation; breeders can deploy it; and independent RL trials can establish whether it delivers value under commercial conditions.
The opportunity is therefore to create a faster pipeline from breeding through predictive evaluation and targeted field testing, to recommendation and farmer adoption.
Field trials remain fundamental: a genetic change or model prediction is not proof that a variety will perform reliably under commercial conditions. AI, genomic prediction and historical RL data should, however, allow us to determine what needs to be tested, where it needs to be tested and how much evidence is required.
The UK possesses decades of agricultural trial data, world-class genetics and breeding science and an extraordinary network of agricultural environments. Combined intelligently, these assets could give us something much more powerful than a list of recommended varieties.
They could give us a national platform for predicting and accelerating crop adaptation.
If gene editing allows us to breed better crops faster, our evaluation system must be capable of moving faster too.
The RL should accelerate and independently validate innovation, rather than become a barrier to its adoption.
Professor Wayne Powell
Principal and chief executive SRUC
Chair designate AHDB Recommended Lists Project Board
Professor Powell will take over as chair in 2027
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