Harvest has been challenging again this year. Heatwaves, flooding and drought are now regular headlines in the UK and around the world. 2026 is no anomaly: four of the five worst harvests have occurred in the last decade, and at our own experimental farm in Bawburgh, the harvest was the earliest on record for the second-year running.

Low yields across many major crops highlight the urgent need to build resilience in the face of increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather.

As Professor Paul Behrens has warned in his expert briefing on food at the National Emergency Briefing: “The climate that gave us reliable harvests is gone. Compound extremes — heat, drought, floods and fires striking together across global breadbaskets — are becoming normal.”

Plant and microbial science have a vital role to play in helping farmers continue to grow the food on which our national security relies. This is not only about developing better crops, but also about supporting agricultural systems that are more diverse, resilient and less reliant on expensive chemical inputs.

We understand more than ever about how plants and microbes interact, how plants grow and develop, and how crops can be improved for the benefit of farmers, the environment and society. But we must accelerate the pace at which this knowledge reaches the field.

At the John Innes Centre we believe that many of the solutions to the major challenges facing society lie within the extraordinary biology of plants and microbes. Earlier this year, in our Science Strategy, we set out a simple but powerful mission: to discover how plants and their associated microbes function for the benefit of people and planet. Delivering on this mission demands an ambitious programme of research and translation to create more sustainable and resilient food systems, improve health through better nutrition and novel medicines, and strengthen the UK’s global leadership in science and innovation.

Both parts of our mission matter. Discovery without benefit risks leaving knowledge on the shelf, while benefit without discovery limits the breakthroughs we need for the future. The opportunity lies in connecting the two: to ensure that fundamental understanding creates new opportunities for impact, while real-world challenges continue to shape the questions we ask.

The challenge of making future harvests more resilient brings that connection into sharp focus. This is something that I have been talking to many people about over the last few months, including at the regenerative agriculture festival, Groundswell.

It’s clear, there are no silver bullets. Agriculture and biology are complex, and so is climate change. Plant science, breeding and crop development are only part of the solution. Without good soil management, cover crops, improved water retention and effective agronomy, we cannot build system-wide resilience. That is why open, collaborative partnerships are so important.

Breeding crops for extreme weather is challenging because the conditions themselves are so varied: heat, drought, waterlogging and everything in between. It is very difficult to create a single variety that can withstand every stress. Crucially, farmers must choose and sow crops long before they know what conditions that season will bring.

Resilience is therefore fundamentally a problem of uncertainty: we need crops and farming systems that can perform across a wider range of possible environments, rather than being optimised for a single stress.

One way to do this is to introduce greater diversity into the crops we grow: varieties better adapted to waterlogging, shorter seasons or other difficult conditions, and plants that give farmers more options when the weather is unpredictable. Greater diversity helps spread risk and can also support biodiversity by reducing reliance on fertilisers and pesticides.

Research at the John Innes Centre supports the development of crops that can thrive under a wider range of conditions. That includes improving familiar staples such as wheat, as well as developing diverse range of new crops that can thrive in climatic extremes and contribute to nutritious diets. The aim is to give farmers more flexibility when wet conditions delay sowing, drought shortens the season or other pressures disrupt the growing cycle.

One example of our work that is moving closer to fields, farms and plates is an area close to my own research.

Over the last century, crop breeding has been extraordinarily successful at increasing yields. But we largely selected varieties for a particular type of agriculture: relatively uniform, high-input systems designed to maximise productivity under favourable conditions. In doing so, we inadvertently narrowed the genetic diversity found in the crops we grow.

That matters because the agriculture we need for the future will demand a broader range of traits. To perform under more variable conditions, crop plants will need to make better use of water and nutrients, interact productively with soils and microbes, and this will contribute to farming systems that rely less heavily on external inputs. Many of the genetic variants that could help us achieve this were simply not priorities when modern crop varieties were developed.

By studying the Watkins Collection, a historic set of locally adapted wheat varieties grown before the Green Revolution, we found that modern breeding left behind around 60% of the genetic diversity. We are now beginning to recover that diversity and are exploring which traits could be usefully deployed on farms today.

This work is made possible by national, publically-funded programmes, supported by UKRI, BBSRC and Defra, and through the development of tools such as precision breeding, DNA sequencing and data analysis. Together, these advances and our partnerships mean it can now take three to five years to move knowledge from the lab towards the farm, compared with around 15-20 years previously.

That shorter horizon matters. It allows scientists to work more closely with farmers, understand the challenges they face now, and test ideas through on-farm trials and move promising approaches into practice more quickly through networks such as BOFIN.

Our next challenge is how we make use of and reintroduce the diversity that modern breeding left behind. One approach is to re-engineer desirable modern traits into locally adapted landraces from the Watkins Collection.

Rather than crossing a pre-1920s variety with a modern elite line and then spending years trying to recover the best of both, we can start with the locally adapted landrace and make specific changes: for example, reducing plant height and improving grain quality.

These small edits can have a powerful effect. They bring 8,000 years of local farmer selection into a modern context, combining adaptation to diverse conditions with traits that support modern agriculture.

This is one example of how heritage wheat collections can help us recover useful diversity, apply what we have learned over the past century, and develop crops that are better suited to the challenges farmers face today.

If we want harvests to remain reliable in an increasingly unreliable climate, we need to act with urgency and ambition. Future harvests depend on the choices we make now.

The science that helps us understand plants, microbes and soils must be supported. The partnerships that move discoveries from the lab to the field must be strengthened. And we need the right commercial and legislative conditions for farmers to adopt new tools, crops and approaches with confidence.

The challenging harvest of 2026 is a reminder that food security starts long before food reaches our plates. It starts in the field, in the soil, in the seed, and in the science that is already helping us build a more resilient future for people and the planet.