Choosing between crops: aspects that affect the user

Abstract

The paper illustrates the need to study the food processor’s current requirements and his developing technologies in choosing crops for the United Kingdom or in expressing British views in developing the European common agricultural policy. Developments in farming, milling and baking are reviewed. These developments have made it possible to increase the proportion of home grown wheat in British bread faster and further than envisaged in the Government’s White Paper ‘Food from our own resources’, up to around 70%, provided certain feed wheat varieties are rejected and provided there is some selection on protein content. Economic implications of these developments and the desirability of changing the balance between bread wheats and higher yielding feed wheats are discussed and targets suggested for the breeding programme which should make it possible to attain 70 % self-sufficiency both in feed wheats and in wheats for direct human consumption. The relative merits of growing malting and feeding barleys are examined in the light of changing malting technology and the successful barley breeding programme. There appear to be attractive opportunities for British agriculture in providing more malting barley within the Community, even though we import a compensating amount of E.E.C. feed grain. The development of high yielding, low nitrogen, dual purpose barleys is desirable and probable, although this is counter to attempts to breed high protein, high lysine feeding barleys. The latter are likely to be attractive to the feed compounder only if they can be produced without loss of yield of metabolizable energy. Tritcale , although of interest to the compounder, is unlikely to be worthwhile in the United Kingdom in the foreseeable future. Spun and extrusion-cooked textured proteins are already being manufactured from soybean protein in the United Kingdom, on a scale equivalent to at least 45000 t of meat per annum. The new technologies are described briefly. The prospects of field beans, field peas, lupins, soya beans and sunflowers as potential sources of raw material from British farms are discussed. For various reasons, none is likely to succeed in this application in the immediate future. Oilseed rape, however, is a potential source of excellent protein concentrate likely to be exploited within 5 years, in spite of remaining toxicological and technical problems. These are discussed with an indication of the latest developments in manufacturing rapeseed protein concentrates. There is a very strong case for encouraging the newer ‘double-low’ varieties of rapeseed in the United Kingdom both as oilseeds and as sources of protein.