Farming Today This Week: Cereals

Charlotte Smith visits Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire to discover how a statistician in the 1920s, Sir Ronald Fisher, transformed the experiments that were conducted on cereals through his understanding of data analysis. Charlotte finds out about Fisher and his legacy from Andrew Mead, a statistician at Rothamsted himself. She also meets Ian Shield, an agronomist, who walks her through the fields of wheat that in some instances are set-up in a way that's a direct influence from Fisher's work. Charlotte also asks Ian about the experiments into genetic modification at Rothamsted, and how concerns around climate change now feed into their experiments.

Producer: Toby Field