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Farming Today: Gene editing, Drones, Year-round tomatoes

US secretary of agriculture, EFRA Committee reports, haricot beans

29/11/2017

Gene editing, Drones, Year-round tomatoes

BBC Radio 4 - Farming Today, Gene editing, Drones, Year-round tomatoes

Should 'gene editing' come in for the same regulation as genetic modification?

What should come under the legal heading of 'genetic modification'? Some argue that new techniques such as gene editing should be differently classified and regulated.

All this week on Farming Today, we're talking GM technology - and a major area of debate in the scientific community is what should come under the legal heading of 'genetic modification'. Some argue that new techniques, such as gene editing, should be differently classified and regulated. BBC Health and Science Correspondent James Gallagher explains the difference between gene editing and GM - and Nancy Nicolson pays a visit to the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, where scientists are experimenting with transgenesis as well as CRISPR technology, a tool for editing genes.

Following the Government's announcement of plans for new legislation to prevent the unsafe or criminal use of drones, the Country Land and Business Association has said the proposed regulations don't go far enough. The organisation wants the law to require recreational users to get landowner permission, before flying drones over private property. Anna Hill asks the CLA's legal adviser, Andrew Gillett, why drones are such a concern.

As we moves steadily towards December, it's not perhaps a usual time of year to think about sun-loving crops such as tomatoes, but in Kent a set of massive greenhouses covering 44 hectares are delivering British-grown tomatoes all year round. Thanet Earth has been growing at the site for the past eight years, and our reporter Howard Shannon went to investigate what goes on inside the greenhouses.

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