Meet our Watercress Master

The Watercress Company is really proud to announce that Damien Lascelles, Watercress Crop Production & Technical Manager at our Spanish company, Royalcress S A has become the first person ever to be awarded a Masters Degree in Food Security, from Lancaster University and more than that, he did it with a distinction!

The Masters’ degree is part of the Food Challenges course sponsored by Waitrose and it identifies that one of the most significant challenges facing humankind is to make enough food available to a population which will probably rise beyond 9 billion within the next 30-40 years.  The course explores how extra food can be produced against a changing climate and with reduced use of a range of resources, nearly all of which are already in short supply including land, water, fertilisers, energy and labour. 

Exploring how to distribute food more effectively, waste less food and make it available in a more environmentally responsible fashion is crucial in today’s society and it’s incredibly important that people like Damien involved in food production lead the way looking into what can and must be done to farm more sustainably.

The Masters course had a maximum time period of 60 months to complete during which time eight modules had to be covered.  Damien started in 2015 and finished by completing his dissertation in July 2019. 

Damien’s choice of dissertation ‘Leaf edge senescence on watercress crops in southern Spain; cause and potential solutions’ was an opportunity to research into something that had a direct impact on his role at Royalcress where he has worked since 1997.  Through his studies Damien explored the causes of damage made to watercress leaves which led to disease, and found to be due to the actions of bacteria called Xanthomonas nasturtii.  Through DNA extraction, he was able to confirm identification.  Through inoculating plants with the bacteria he was able to confirm that Xanthomonas nasturtii is pathogenic specifically to watercress since following inoculation, disease developed in watercress and not cabbage,  which is from the same brassica family.  By working with other experts from Lancaster and Warwick Universities, as well as Cambrico Biotech in Seville, Damien looked into possible treatments such as copper gluconate which strengthens up the cell walls protecting them against entry of disease-causing bacteria .  He tested this assumption by  inoculating Xanthomonas nasturtii  into  treated and untreated plants.  Results showed a reduced level of infection on treated plants.

Watercress showing levels of Xanthomonas infection from a where the plant is free from infection to d where symptoms are severe, Vicente (2017).

Clearly this will have an immediate application and impact on his role at Royalcress, but the whole Masters’ process has increased Damien’s knowledge and encouraged him to think logically about problems as well as potential improvements they can make at Royalcress to ensure and increase the quality of their product.

Damien adds: “The course was hard work and combining study with my job was quite tough at times but I’m really glad I did it.  I have developed a fantastic network of contacts, both fellow students and university lecturers, from whom I can ask for help in any future investigations that we, as a business, might want to undertake.  I have a much greater understanding of trial methodology and practice, both in the field and in the laboratory, which will positively affect my approach in future projects.”

As an undergraduate Damien studied horticultural science which was jointly run by the University of Hertfordshire and Writtle Agricultural College in Essex with a year’s practical experience at the most northerly UK hardy nursery stock grower in Banff.  Before joining Royalcress in 1997 he worked at Van Heyningen Bros pot herb production unit in Sussex and then at York University where he looked after various plants and growth room facilities for researchers and students.

After 22 years at Royalcress he must have thought his involvement with student life was well and truly over but he’d like to say a huge thank you to Jon Pinder at Winglands Foods who first alerted The Watercress Company to the opportunity and of course to Lancaster University and Waitrose for making another highly successful stint at student life possible.