ABSTRACT
In late March 2011, field technicians in Bernburg, Germany, sowed an organic spring wheat variety experiment on their fertile loess soil, with the wheat following a pre-crop of faba beans (Vicia faba) (LLFG, 2011). On the same day, nearly 7000 km to the west, organic crop specialist Chris Reberg-Horton took pictures of winter wheat plots from an organic variety trial near Kinston, North Carolina, documenting the differences of crop development among the various wheat varieties. It was also the day when a conference on climate change and agriculture ended in Budapest, Hungary, where plant breeder Peter Mikó had presented work on the assessment of gene bank accessions of the tetraploid wheat species Triticum timopheevii under organic conditions (Mikó et al., 2011). Still on the same date, organic farmer John Pawsey posted a blog about how he manages his winter wheat crops on his farm in Suffolk, East Anglia, United Kingdom, with a cameraguided mechanical weeding system and a harrow comb (Pawsey, 2011).
