Nordic countries pool 50 years of crop trial data
Aasen NR, Herrera-Foessel SA, Vandeskog SM, Bengtsson T, Dida MG
Crop Improvement
The barley in your beer and the red clover cover crop in a nearby field were bred using trial data that stayed locked inside national borders, and this pooled dataset means future varieties get tested against a far wider range of real-world weather and soil conditions before they ever reach a farm.
For decades, Nordic countries each ran their own separate field trials to test new crop varieties, meaning breeders in Norway couldn't easily learn from what worked in Finland or Denmark. This project gathered yield data on spring barley, red clover, and potato from 1970 to 2024 across all these countries into one combined dataset, so breeders can now compare how varieties perform across many more environments at once. The goal is to speed up development of crop varieties that hold up better as the climate shifts.
Key Findings
Dataset spans 1970-2024, covering 54 years of official field trial and VCU (Value for Cultivation and Use) records
Combines yield data across three major crops: spring barley, red clover, and potato
Harmonizes trial data from multiple Nordic countries to enable cross-regional comparative analysis
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers combined over 50 years of field trial data for barley, red clover, and potato from across the Nordic countries into one shared dataset, giving plant breeders a much bigger picture of how crops perform across different climates and regions to help develop varieties that can handle a changing climate.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
A multi-environment dataset consisting of official field trials for three major crops in the Nordic countries.
Climate change will substantially impact agriculture, requiring the development of new crop cultivars adapted for resilience to future stresses. Developing a new crop cultivar is a decades-long pro...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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