The Sage is the place to be on 16 November

It seems as though five minutes ago Relu's "Who should run the countryside" was months away but suddenly we have barely two weeks to go. No need to panic though, or so I keep telling myself. Bookings are high, and we are still taking some last minute applications, the debate and workshop speakers are all organised and briefed, the Relu projects are poised to wow the delegates with their interactive activities, our film makers at Xube have the films in hand and we aim to try them out on the big screen the week before the premier to make sure all the technical stuff is ok. The Relu Awards themselves are safely in my office but I'm keeping those under wraps for now. Suffice it to say that they are amazing.

Stars in our eyes

As autumn creeps in, and Halloween masks appear in shop windows, our conference seems scarily close. Assistant Director Jeremy Phillipson and I have spent this morning with the crew from Xube who are making films to show at The Sage on 16 November. They have been meeting up with the teams shortlisted in the Relu Awards and filming the projects, the teams and their stakeholders. Delegates will be able to view the results as part of the conference programme, and vote for the overall winners. It's our version of the "X Factor" so we are taking it very seriously. From what I have seen, the footage looks great and I think it will be hard to choose between the entries. But we have also commissioned a 10 minute film which will include brief vignettes of the finalists, and an overview of Relu's achievements. This will feature comments from some high profile stakeholders to the Relu programme, and from the team at the Director's Office. Jeremy agonised a bit about whether this was an occasion which demanded the wearing of a tie, and I thought that there might be a make-up lady to run on at intervals with a powder puff, but, apart from some fiddling about to reduce the reflection from our spectacles, nobody seemed very bothered about how we looked. Which is probably just as well. I'm not sure Jeremy and I can compete with Simon Cowell and Cheryl Cole.

No more caveat emptor!

Hitting both Farmers' Weekly and Farmers' Guardian last Friday with a story from Relu researchers (http://www.relu.ac.uk/news/Press%20Releases/Livestock%20disease%20final.docx) does feel like a small triumph. Graham Medley and his interdisciplinary team from Warwick University have been investigating endemic disease in livestock - those conditions that don't usually make headlines but do affect farmers' profits and animal welfare. They conclude that making more information available to livestock buyers about risks in the herd from which they are buying could be an important means of reducing disease. Obviously the price would reduce for animals from a herd with a poor disease record, which could provide the incentive needed for farmers to get to grips with the problems. It will be interesting to see whether this stimulates some debate among the readers of the farming press.

Catching the learning curve

Animal and plant disease has been much on my mind recently, as Relu's projects on this theme come to fruition. I have been working on policy and practice notes from the research and on our briefing paper "Growing Concerns: animal and plant disease policy for the 21st century" which draws heavily, not just on the impressive work being carried out by research teams in the programme, but also on the stakeholder workshop we ran in London on 10 May this year. This does give the document a relevance and "real world" feel that I think it might otherwise lack. We owe much to people who are willing to spend valuable time enhancing the research in this way - and who are prepared to be quoted, as many have been in this briefing paper. Putting the publication together has been a great learning process for me, on a topic about which I knew nothing. But that has been the story of my involvement with the programme.

All hands to the plough

I have just returned from a brilliant holiday in Romania, visiting cultural sites. The mediaeval painted churches are particularly dazzling. But we drove through the countryside I was also struck by the amount of subsistence farming. There were strip field systems that looked as mediaeval as the churches, and people working them with horse-drawn ploughs. One or two cows would be tethered by the roadside and presumably they were milked by hand. My companions on the trip were very taken by the idea of the organic produce on offer at the roadside stalls. It's true that the plums, apples and watermelons were delicious, and it was heartening to see families working together in the fields. But I couldn't help wondering whether such a labour-intensive approach can continue now that Romania is part of the European community. Not many people in the UK would want to work so hard to produce food.

Beautiful and useful

I spent a lovely couple of days in the North York Moors for my birthday last month (21 and a bit since you ask). We didn't even get rained on much. It's an untamed and beautiful landscape and I hadn't really given much thought to the benefits that we get from it - beyond the obvious aesthetic enjoyment. But of course, increasingly, we need more and more from our limited allocation of land in the UK and areas like the uplands provide us with some of the real essentials - not just food but water, carbon storage and renewable energy. Efficiency is everything, even for ecology. So how can we squeeze more from these landscapes? If farmers collaborated, that would help - scale is usually a factor in efficiency - but there is little tradition of this in the UK. Relu's latest policy and practice note for local government is a rallying cry to national parks to provide a lead and they are well-positioned to do so. Perhaps these beautiful, wild landscapes provide an example for us all. They will be providing a focus for discussion at the Relu/Northern Rural Network event on 14 September where the note will be launched.

Camera, Action!

Filming has now started for the Relu Awards films. Richard from Xube, the company producing the films has been keeping me updated on their progress and it all sounds very exciting. I am delighted that the finalists have found so many people willing to strut their stuff on camera - both researchers and stakeholders - and they have been braving the rain to keep up with the filming schedule. It sounds as though the films will do them justice and I'm looking forward to seeing the results. Richard has asked me whether I would like to go and see them at work and it's certainly tempting. Watching the professionals in action is fascinating. TV companies are always looking for locations and seem particularly keen on using hospitals so I had several opportunities to watch film crews in action during the time I spent in NHS communications. That included a couple of weeks when one production company was making making an episode of "Wire in the Blood" at the hospital where I was based. But I'm sure none of our researchers would play the big star in quite the same way as Robson Green. Fortunately.