00:00Climate change is favouring cereal cultivation in areas where it was previously ruled out due to extreme weather conditions, such as here in Iceland.
00:11What we have here is a yield trial of oats, where we test the yield.
00:16We want to see how oats can perform in the extreme environment.
00:20That can be extremely cold, it can be snowy, it can be very windy, and it can be rainy, it can be dry.
00:27And yeah, we definitely want to look deeper into that and adapting oats to the final frontier.
00:38Five countries from the peripheral areas of Northern Europe and the Arctic are participating in Oat Frontiers, a pan-European inter-regional project.
00:47The idea for it was conceived here, at the Agricultural University of Iceland, near Reykjavik.
00:53Helga is researching the properties of more than 400 varieties of oats.
00:59The seeds in these bags are weighed and measured before and after drying and cleaning.
01:04Once we have cleaned them, we know their complete yield, and can calculate how much tons per hectare we have collected,
01:15and how much total yield we get from each gene, which type of oats.
01:21Oat is an extremely hardy plant. It can grow in very poor conditions, but still have excellent yield.
01:30Oat has been growing cereal since 2009, but in this part of Iceland, he is the only one who sells oats for human consumption.
01:39We get, you know, less yield than in warmer countries, where it's very healthy.
01:44You know, we don't use any chemicals, so we can produce a lot of cereals.
01:49Currently, we are using Swedish variety, but I'm sure that in the future they will bring us new varieties that are much bigger, much better.
02:01That is the long-term goal of this project.
02:05The total budget for this project is 1.6 million euros, 60% of which have been financed by the European Cohesion Policy.
02:13Ten partners from five countries are participating in the project.
02:17Iceland, Ireland, Finland, Sweden and Norway.
02:23Oats are more resistant and require fewer fungicides than other cereals.
02:28But how do you determine which variety is best for each region?
02:32Is there one for the entire Great North?
02:35This is what we call an interaction of the genotype and the environment.
02:39And we want to know if we can find one that is good in all the locations,
02:45or if we need to see that this one is good in Ireland, which is completely different from what is good in Finland and all over.
02:52We don't know, but we will find out.
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