IT made sense to reduce the amount of unsustainable fossil fuels and replace them with sustainable fuels from crops, according to Dr David Hall, former principal of Pershore College.

Biodeiesel produced from oilseed rape and bioethanol from cereal crops were perhaps the best known and offered farmers the opportunity to grow crops for biofuels and at the same time improve their image.

"It could bring real dividends for many farmers," he said when he chaired the Pershore and Upton-on-Severn branch NFU prestigious Pershore Conference on Fuel for Thought at the Frank Parkinson Centre at the college.

The conference featured a number of top speakers and Peter Kendall, deputy president of the NFU, pointed out that increasingly the industry had to look at ways of showing farming as a positive force and the fact that climate change was a very serious threat offered the opportunity through growing crops for fuel.

"It is a great opportunity for farmers and producers to be seen as providers of solutions and make recommendations," he said.

"It could reverse 20 years of ambivalence to productive agriculture and I am very optimistic about it."

Professor Melvyn Askew, head of agricultural and rural strategy group central science laboratory, said farmers had to attack the markets and look closely at added values in perhaps unlikely places, pointing out that lipstick from crops sold at £70,000 a tonne.

"The opportunities are there and I urge you to make a move and make it quickly," he said.

Somerset farmer Archie Montgomery who grows oilseed rape for fuel and barley which goes to Spain for the production of bioethanol spoke about his experiences of growing short rotation coppice and miscanthus and of the opportunities they provided on different types of land.

Nick Maskery, project co-ordinator for the Bio-Energy West Midlands' initiative, said bio-fuels involved learning new skills and new business interests in order to improve profitability.