Question: How do you plan on making your crops grow bigger?

Emma Bennett answered on 13 Jun 2011:

I’m looking into several different ways to try and make the seeds bigger and more nutritious which might lead to bigger crops.

Firstly I’ve been cutting some of the stems off of my plants and although this might sound a little bit mad there is a logic to it. The idea is that if plants have the same amount of leaves but fewer seeds then more resources from the leaves can go into these remaining seeds and hopefully make them bigger.

I’m also looking at the natural variation that exists in oilseed rape to see if different lines are able to make bigger seeds, which meant that today I got to go sampling a field trial that contains 205 different lines. If the seed size varies between these lines then I’ll then begin to look into the genetics behind this to try and understand how the seeds become bigger.