Together, the beet sugar industry has a long term ambition to find a solution to the challenge of virus yellows (VY) without the use of neonicotinoid seed treatments. This is a complex issue to solve and will take time.
Working together
We are actively working on a Virus Yellows strategy together with British Sugar and the BBRO.
Creating fully resistant varieties
With experts, our intention as an industry is to find solutions in areas such as new VY tolerant seed varieties, new seed treatments to establish the crop more quickly, sustainable spray programmes, improved grower practices and ultimately creating fully resistant varieties using modern breeding techniques such as gene editing.
