IOR-HDRA,
Centre for Organic Horticulture,
Garden Organic Ryton
Coventry Warwickshire
United Kingdom CV8 3LG

The Organic Weeds Group

People working on the organic weed management project

Gareth Davies

Gareth is a Senior Research Officer with IOR-HDRA. He has a background in agricultural experimental work concerned with pests, diseases and varieties. This has included 10 years work in low external input farming systems involving the use of participatory research and extension methods as well as on-farm trials. He is currently working on aspects of pest and disease management in organic farming systems with a specialist interest in a whole farm participatory approach.

Phil Sumption

Phil is an organic agronomist working on the DEFRA funded 'Conversion to organic field vegetable production' project in the International Research Department of HDRA. Phil has been involved in organic horticulture for nearly 15 years including 7 years as an organic grower in Somerset.

Bill Bond

Bill is a part time researcher at IOR-HDRA. As a weed scientist for over 30 years has been involved in many aspects of weed research in both conventional and organic horticulture. His main interest in the current project is to extract and make available to farmers, growers and others as much information as possible on weeds and weed control from the scientific literature and commercial publications.

Andrea Grundy

Andrea has been working at HRI Wellesbourne for 9 years. She completed a PhD at Reading University titled 'The implications of extensification for crop weed interactions in cereals'. Andrea is currently working on modelling weed population dynamics and all aspects of conventional and organic weed control in field vegetables.

Andrew Mead

Andrew is a biometrician/statistician working at HRI, Wellesbourne. He has a long collaboration with Andrea Grundy on various aspects of weed control, much associated with understanding and modelling the weed seedbank. He has worked recently with HDRA to provide statistical support to a number of projects. He will be providing the statistical expertise needed to design and analyse all experimental work within this project.

David Gibbon

David has 40 years experience in agriculture and rural development research and education, in both the South and the North, with a particular interest in low external input farming and livelihood systems research. He specialises in farming systems and participatory research approaches focusing on using learning and action methods in research programmes.

Lois Philipps

Lois is a Senior Researcher at IOR-EFRC. She has extensive experience in delivering training on a range of organic issues including grassland management, biodiversity and nutrient management within UK, EU and Internationally. She acts as the Farmer group facilitator for the OAS Dairy farmer group and the OAS Beef and Sheep farmer group.

Bill Cormack

Bill manages organic arable and horticulture activities across ADAS. For the past ten years he has been based at Terrington in Norfolk where 20 ha are farmed in a stockless arable rotation. This includes the long-term DEFRA-funded project on assessing sustainability.

Pete Berry

Pete completed his PhD on ‘Predicting Lodging risk in Wheat’ in 1998 at the University of Nottingham and has since researched many aspects of lodging, the design of crop ideotypes and organic systems for ADAS. His organic studies have included constructing nutrient budgets and assessing the importance of nitrogen availability in limiting crop yields.