Industry leaders from the livestock and aquaculture sectors came together to discuss 11 key research and innovation priorities identified in a new report.
About 150 people attended the event at the UK Agri-Tech Centre’s Midlands Hub in Newport, Shropshire, both in-person and online, to listen to and engage with the newly published report, ‘Livestock and Aquaculture Innovation: The Next Ten Years’.
The aim of the event was to address some of the challenges livestock and aquaculture faces and understand how the UK Agri-Tech Centre can do more to help the sector achieve its goals and provide valuable insights for the whole agri-food supply chain.
Discussions covered emerging threats, expertise availability, research and innovation infrastructure and how activities and investment can be directed to ensure growth for the UK.
The report outlined 11 priorities for the industries’ sustainability and resilience, including animal health and welfare; food safety, quality and nutritional content; climate-smart solutions, ecosystem and biodiversity improvement; optimised diets, land performance and systems; and productivity, data assets and technology.
These priorities are linked to the UK Agri-Tech Centre’s strategic themes: One Health, Sustainable Production, Resilient Systems and Intelligent Agriculture.
The report also specifies sector-level priorities for dairy, beef, sheep, pig, poultry and aquaculture, and outlines the necessary research, development and innovation landscape required to support them.
Speaking at the event on 17 July, Phil Bicknell, Chief Executive of the UK Agri-Tech Centre, said: “I firmly believe the UK Agri-Tech Centre has a very important role to play in terms of helping the industry stay ahead of the curve by identifying and addressing current and future challenges.
“It is crucial to study these in more detail to understand the challenges and help define the positive role agri-tech can play when it comes to innovation.
“Here at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, our role is to help resolve some of these challenges and make sure that our worldclass network of experts and research facilities are able to test, demonstrate and validate new ideas and ultimately support that effective uptake at scale and at pace.”
Dr Ruth Bastow, Innovation Director at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, added: “We work with a wide range of experts and sector specialists, including those in animal food and nutrition, agriculture, engineering, data, sustainability and soil health, to name just a few.
“For me it is that critical mass across the sector that is part of our USP at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, and we can take this holistic and system-wide approach to looking at the problems we have today, but more importantly the challenges we’re also going to have to face up to tomorrow.
“Here at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, we have the ability to go from ‘idea’ to ‘impact’ – we can fish that idea out of the lab, take it out into field trials and eventually get it into the hands of the end users to really make a difference.
“It’s about identifying the problem and figuring out how we are going to solve it.
“We want to help your business to grow and drive impactful and rapid change.”
Dr Grace O’Gorman, Head of External Relations at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, said: “The livestock and aquaculture sectors are certainly facing grand challenges, whether that’s climate change, looking at sustainability, One Health or food security.
“The report itself is a real invitation to those sectors to sit down and create a vision with us for how we’re going to develop solutions, not only for today, but into tomorrow.”
Who is the UK Agri-Tech Centre helping?
The event also heard from a range of businesses which have been supported by the UK Agri-Tech Centre.
With funding from Innovate UK, the UK Agri-Tech Centre is in a unique position to help small businesses flourish.
Anthony Marsh, Director at cow health company HoofCount, said the firm’s recent Innovate UK project had been ‘an absolutely fantastic achievement for us’.
He added: “To be able to actually use Innovate UK to create a collaboration between ourselves, the UK Agri-Tech Centre and Bristol Robotics Laboratory, to come up with something that is completely above my head – an AI machine learning vision system – would have been a dream many years ago but now we’ve successfully completed this project and brought it to the market.
“With the help of the UK Agri-Tech Centre and Innovation UK supporting with the likes of bid writing, project management, the use of test facilities, building connections and collaborations with customers and partners and providing funding, we can do that sort of thing.”
For Karl Williams, Director at FAI Farms, the whole premise of their business is about supporting and improving animal welfare within livestock systems by formulating and delivering sustainable commitments such as regenerative grazing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
He said: “Through science and research and development within a commercial environment there are great pieces of work that are done with a small number of livestock.
“However, things like cash flow, engagement with the industry and communication has been really difficult so the more collaborations and support we can have is really important and the UK Agri-Tech Centre can help play a part in that.”
Dr Jack James is the Founder and Managing Director at Pontus Research, a market-leading research and development service provider to the global aquaculture industry.
He said: “Almost every grant that comes out to develop sustainable feeds, production methods or reduce greenhouse gas emission, always has a no aquaculture clause.
“It’s a very innovative sector and that’s partly because we’ve got so many different species that we’re having to work with, but we don’t have access to the same level of funding.
“The cross-sectoral work that we are doing with the UK Agri-Tech Centre can really help to drive where the funding comes from and help aquaculture to be more embedded in agriculture and landscape.”
To download a copy of the report, please visit www.ukagritechcentre.com