We should have learned two critical lessons over the last few months. The first is the astonishing achievement of science in rapidly developing a vaccine to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in countries that had a government and a population that believe in the application of and rigorous monitoring of science.

The second is the vulnerability of us as farmers and consumers to suppliers of materials essential for normal life, where these suppliers are essentially governed by people, not subject to normal democratic norms.

While wider society has been mostly affected directly by the crunch in energy, farmers have been most affected by the surge in fertiliser prices and their sporadic availability, especially of nitrogen-based ones.

During the week, Andy Doyle reported on the work in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to enable other crops apart from clover and beans to capture nitrogen from the air, and so be largely independent of manufacture-purchased nitrogenous fertiliser.

Farmers have been most affected by the surge in fertiliser prices and their sporadic availability, especially of nitrogen-based ones

But it’s not only in the US that this work is going on – the specialist crop research body The John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, is making progress in identifying specific mechanisms to allow crops such as wheat to fix its own nitrogen the way normal legume plants do.

Farmers are also being encouraged to move away from Calcium Ammonium Nitrogen (CAN) as a fertiliser for greenhouse gas reasons.

Farmers have also been taken aback at the major manufacturers willingness to simply cease manufacturing nitrogen fertiliser when the price of natural gas rose to erode profitability. The lessons should be clear.

The capacity of well-directed science to solve mankind’s problems is enormous, its application to provide food at ever decreasing prices in real terms is well proven. It would seem obvious that public policy should be directed at identifying priorities and pursuing them with real determination.

The present approach to new scientific developments in crop and food production are dramatically different to the approach taken in adopting new developments in medicine. Why is not clear.