At the outset of Covid, panic food buying saw our vegetable shelves emptied sending many of us to our local garden centres to buy seed. A combination of ‘Digging for Britain’ and the Good life. The lockdown then closed our garden centres and seed, as with all things, mostly became available to the public via the internet. Overnight, as UK garden centres and supply chains endeavoured to make themselves accessible to their customers online, the UK public awoke to the fact that they could browse and purchase online seed, even plants, from a myriad of alternative suppliers across the world. Read more

Under BASICS , the National Agricultural Seeds Council (NASC) has successfully undertaken the first Breeders’ Seed assessment of Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) virus presence and prevalence, collecting leaf samples from the field and undertaking the laboratory analysis at the NASC Molecular Seed Testing Laboratory; thus paving the way for the adoption of the first Breeders Seed Standard for Cassava in Nigeria. Read more