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Research
A multi-million pound programme of strategic research delivered over five years providing science and evidence to support policymakers and its partners. Informed by strong partnerships and the needs of a broad range of stakeholders. Science at the heart of society contributing to the health, wealth and wellbeing of Scotland and beyond.
Explore our research projects
This project uses existing and new data on farm businesses to provide a baseline of basic and best practice adoption in Scotland that can be used to evaluate future change. Using information provided by farmers in surveys and workshops, it also aims to identify opportunities for promoting best practice uptake across the agricultural sector to achieve enhanced agricultural productivity while reducing the overall impact on the environment.
- Improving Agricultural Practice
- 2022-2027
We are delivering a comprehensive body of research that integrates cutting-edge mapping, artificial intelligence, genomics, experimental, and modelling techniques to quantify the abundance, diversity, and spatiotemporal dynamics of key Scottish crop pests and pathogens, as well as the ecology of pest and pathogen-host-environment-management interactions and potential impacts of climate change.
- Plant Disease
- 2022-2027
To maintain and improve animal welfare despite the UK's EU Exit, we will analyse how lower welfare standards from importing countries could impact farm sustainability, provide evidence on welfare issues relating to relevant standards, inform welfare aspects of CAP replacement, and develop welfare assessment methods (informed by emerging international standards). A selection of topical case studies will be produced and guided by policy developments.
- Animal Welfare
- 2022-2027
This project addressees an important food safety issue, the contamination of cereal foods with mycotoxins which are produced by fungi in agricultural production. This project aims to minimize the risk to consumers from mycotoxin contamination in cereal foods by improving our understanding of the sources of contamination in primary cereal production and processing and by assessing human exposure and risk through biomarker analysis.
- Food & Drink Improvements
- 2022-2027
We explore the biological consequences and potential practical applications of natural genetic variation found in the primary barley genepool to address future priorities in low carbon cereal agriculture. This is a contemporary barley genetics, genomics and informatics research project focused on scientific discovery and impactful translational biology.
- Crop Improvement
- 2022-2027
This project evaluates the potential of Scotland’s underutilised lands to contribute towards a sustainable food system and provide economic motivation to protect our natural capital. The focus is on wild species that can contribute towards sustainable food production, while meeting environment and biodiversity targets. Engagement with a wide range of stakeholders provides a RoadMap that will meet cross-sector needs.
- Crop Improvement
- 2022-2027
We are working with Holstein cows from representative genetic lines and typical feeding systems to investigate relationships between milk production, efficiency and the ability to withstand the effects of climate change on feed supply and composition. We are developing new measures of feed variability, describe it for typical feeding systems and investigate effects on milk production and cow health. This is done with diets designed to reduce C footprints. Our aim is to develop optimal breeding and management strategies for climate smart production, climate resilience and enhanced...
- Livestock Improvement
- 2022-2027
This research aims to quantify the flow of Antimicrobial resistance genes and pathogens from the environment to the food chain and directly to humans in the farm environment under different farming practices. This will be integrated with social science work on antimicrobial use. Both quantitative and qualitative data will be used to develop a risk assessment model based on a Bayesian Belief Network.
- Diet & Food Safety
- 2022-2027
This project is providing evidence for understanding factors leading to demonstrable change in innovation and investment in Scottish food supply chains, in particular the role of policy and government support through (1) mapping and (2) ranking incentives to innovation uptake by their effectiveness; and (3) developing models of support to innovation uptake at supply chain level feeding into an innovation uptake incentive framework at sectoral level.
- Food Supply & Security
- 2022-2027
This project is providing baseline measurements of greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage for various Scotland’s food & drink production & manufacturing processes. We are also developing a case study for the malting industry and providing datasets and tools to show how these processes can be optimised to reduce the environmental impact of producing and manufacturing food & drink products.
- Food & Drink Improvements
- 2022-2027