Researchers in the School of Civil Engineering have studied lodging for many years, - indeed the current Head of School worked on this problem as a young and eager Post-Doctoral Research Fellow towards the end of the 1990s. The primary focus at this time was on winter wheat, and the cause of the lodging, which was much contested among farmers. Two types of lodging were identified: ‘root lodging’, where the root anchorage system failed and the plant uprooted, and ‘stem lodging’ where the stem buckled, usually near the ground. The circumstances under which lodging occurred and thus the appropriate response was also disputed: Some advocated rolling the ground to increase soil strength whilst others advocated the use of plant growth regulators to reduce the height of plants and thus to make them more “stable”. Alternatively some argued for selective breeding of crops to encourage those crop traits that reduced lodging (although there was no agreement on what these traits actually were). The School collaborated with colleagues in agricultural and environmental consultancy group, ADAS, to investigate the problem. With a ‘typically engineering’ style approach – researchers built a mathematical model of the soil/crop/weather system, using classical structural analysis principles. This proved to be very useful and was able to identify the plant characteristics, soil types and weather conditions under which the different types of lodging occurred, and thus enabled alleviation methods to be applied in a rational way. This work was supplemented by experimental work to measure a range of winter wheat parameters – crop height, stem and root strength, natural frequency etc., and by the use of a mobile wind tunnel that could be taken out into fields to blow crops over. This work was incorporated into ADAS guidance for the farming industry on how lodging can be reduced.