Sows giving birth and suckling their piglets are kept in farrowing crates which severely restrict their movements and behavioural freedom. Momentum for change to free or flexible (i.e. temporary) farrowing systems is growing, with voluntary or legal bans coming in across EU countries, and a major debate in the UK pig industry. SRUC has a 40-year history of applied research and knowledge exchange in this area, influencing farming stakeholders, regulators and policy makers. Recent work has included discussions on regulations and policy with NGOs and industry stakeholders including QMS and AHDB, attending roundtables hosted by CIWF and SG, advising farmers and policy makers (EU, SG, Defra) and demonstrating SRUC’s PigSAFE free farrowing system. We are also developing SowSpace – a decision support tool that distils the scientific and experiential knowledge into design data, allowing stakeholders to visualize systems virtually and guiding them towards making decisions that optimize both welfare and productivity.
The National Soil Archive and Scottish Soils Database (Underpinning National Capacity) include georeferenced samples and data from systematic National Soil Inventory surveys (NSIS 1978-87, NSIS2 2007-9). Within the current SRP, advanced statistical and machine learning approaches are being applied to complex multivariate NSIS2 datasets of chemical, physical and biological characteristics (e.g., infrared spectra, X-ray diffraction, phospholipid profiles). This is being used to identify metrics of soil status; and improve understanding of the context-specificity of soil functions and their sensitivity to change. This understanding is critical in monitoring soil status for multiple policy and regulator priorities. Such monitoring needs to be co-developed within the context of clearly specified policy and regulator needs, which will guide selection of the best metrics and statistical design of soil data collections. The vision is to expand the use of ‘big data’ approaches, for example exploiting existing eDNA archives and utilising emergent sources, such as LiDAR.
As part of a multi-disciplinary biosecurity project, we have developed practical resources to help farmers prevent and manage disease transmission in livestock. Initially targeting Johne’s Disease, PRRS, and Roundworm, our work now promotes broader on-farm biosecurity practices. Outputs include discussion support tools, a sampling game, videos, animations, and AI-powered tools, designed for farmers, vets, advisors, and students. By making biosecurity engaging, accessible, and easy to embed in everyday practice, these resources encourage reflection and behaviour change. Delivered through our Bitesize Biosecurity platforms, they aim to strengthen livestock health, reduce the spread of costly diseases, and build more resilient farming systems. At the conference, attendees will be able to sample, test, and play with these interactive tools first-hand!
The lecture will take place at Edinburgh International Conference Centre, beginning at 5pm on Wednesday 1st October with a pre-lecture exhibition. This will be followed at 6pm by Professor Raworth’s talk and a Q&A session. A post-lecture reception will also be held at 7:30pm.
A SEFARI stand will be in the pre-lecture exhibition so please come and see us if you're attending.
Fine out more about the event on this James Hutton Institute webpage.
Tickets for this event are now sold out.
The sustainability of rural economies requires a healthy population structure and local availability of necessary skills. This
can be achieved by retaining the current population and attracting new dwellers. Accordingly, the Scottish Government’s
National Population Strategy aims to promote “a population [that] is more balanced and distributed across Scotland.”
While often desirable from the naturalistic point of view, rural, island and remote locations are generally characterised
by lower accessibility to keystone services, forcing people to make difficulttrade-offs. Therefore, we investigate Scottish
residents’ willingness to move (or not) to places that differ in terms of their natural environment, and service accessibility.
Our results allow us to draw conclusions on what is needed to attract different demographics to such places.
The Scotland’s Land Reform Futures project (JHI-E3-1), as well as additional policy responsive projects, have involved dataset review, integration, and novel analyses seeking to inform the development of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill (currently passing through Parliament). This has included work identifying and characterising large landholdings that may fall in scope of provisions set out in the Bill and explores the impact of spatial contiguity of large landholdings (at the request of the Land Reform Bill team). Regular meetings and correspondence with the Bill team has raised awareness of issues surrounding elements of the Bill, built enduring networks with key Scottish Government officials involved in the drafting of the Bill (several of whom have shared positive feedback on the value of this policy-focussed analysis), and was cited in the Stage 1 report on the Bill by the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee.
Nutritional interventions to reduce enteric methane or ammonia emissions from cattle are applied with no consideration for trade-offs with other gaseous emissions. Lack of facilities measuring multiple gases simultaneously means there is little data to investigate trade-offs. We conducted a meta-analysis of published studies investigating enteric methane or ammonia mitigation from dairy cows where both gases were measured or one could be estimated by proxy. We found potential for win-win scenarios, particularly with ammonia mitigation strategies. Studies measuring multiple gases and quantifying trade-offs and synergies between strategies would lead to cohesion between climate change, environmental protection and air quality policies.
Work in the current, and previous, Strategic Research Programmes has developed a new vaccine to control louping ill, a tick-borne disease primarily affecting sheep and red grouse. Louping ill causes significant economic losses for farmers and grouse estates in Scotland and is increasing in prevalence. Working together with key industry partners, and with funding from farming and moorland stakeholders, a novel approach is now being taken to commercialise the vaccine. This will involve transferring the production process to commercial scale before performing studies to ensure the safety and effectiveness of the new vaccine formulation. Data from these trials will be used to prepare a comprehensive regulatory proposal, which will be submitted to the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, for market registration of the vaccine prior to it becoming commercially available. The availability of a new louping ill vaccine will be a valuable tool for sheep producers seeking to control this devastating disease.
Gold-standard welfare assessments of dairy cattle, e.g., Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA), require training and are time consuming in a sector with labour constraints. Utilising existing sensors on farm for management purposes (e.g. oestrus detection) for welfare evaluation could benefit farmers and the wider industry. As with QBA, sensors enable early detection of health/welfare issues, supporting management decisions and productivity, without substantial labour demands. This study demonstrated the assessment of welfare in dairy cattle via automated animal-mounted sensor data, with sensor-derived behavioural features classifying mood states (positive or negative as per QBA scores) in 61% of observations. Demonstrating additional benefits of sensors on farm could further increase uptake of data-driven solutions. Furthermore, this research provides evidence of a potential automated measure of on-farm welfare using technologies commercially available, which could be used to inform and gain trust from consumers, as well as being utilised for welfare schemes and by processors.
Using capacity developed since 2008 (Brian Pack inquiry, Agricultural Support), SRP research shaped the 2015 reform of payment regions. The 2022-27 SRP has supporting policy options from the Vision for Agriculture. In particular, the analysis, of the impact and uptake of Enhanced Conditionality (EC) measures (with SRP experts from biodiversity, soils and waters). EC will fundamentally reshape what public subsidies deliver for climate and biodiversity crises. The analysis, with SRUC colleagues, also reconsidered payment regions and related mechanism to make them more fit for purpose. The analysis informed deliberations by RESAS analysts, RPID officials and policy teams before the Agriculture Reform Bill and by the Agricultural Reform Implementation Oversight Board. The research is also shaping the ARP Monitoring and Evaluation framework. The SRP capacity has been further exploited in UNC (Support-to-Policy) and Contract Research (3 since 2019). The analytical frameworks have also informed deliberations on grouse moor management, the Land Use Strategy and the Land Reform Bill.