Pastoral 21 is a collaborative venture involving DairyNZ, Fonterra, the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand, Beef + Lamb New Zealand and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, and managed by AgResearch. Designed to boost farm productivity and reduce environmental impacts, the programme, which began in 2007, is now well into its second phase, and has seen teams from many research organisations working together in a variety of coordinated research and farmer adoption programmes. Initial programmes encompassed the full spectrum of scale and complexity.

GROUND-BREAKING LIVESTOCK INNOVATION CENTRE LAUNCHED 26 February 2016 A new £70 million innovation centre will bring together the food industry and academic researchers to transform the productivity of the UK livestock industry. The Centre of Innovation Excellence in Livestock (CIELivestock) has been allocated £27.7 million funding from the Government’s Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) to set up state-of-the-art facilities across the UK, providing the livestock industry with world-beating access to research.

New Centre for Crop Health and Protection Established in UK 31 March 2016 Today sees the launch of a new Centre for Crop Health and Protection (CHAP) under the government’s Agri-Tech strategy, which was launched in 2013 to ensure that its investment in agriculture delivers material benefits for society and the economy in the UK and overseas. CHAP will lead the way in developing solutions to the challenges facing world agriculture, bringing together the best expertise, knowledge and insight from leading research organisations and industries in the sector.

Agrimetrics: putting the UK at heart of the big data revolution in agriculture 27 March 2015 — Centres for Agricultural Innovation The scale of the problem and challenges In the next 20 years, the global food system will face challenges that are unprecedented in the history of agriculture. However, these next two decades will also offer unprecedented opportunity to those nations and organisations best equipped to meet these.

£17.5m funding secured to help develop precision farming 13 March 2016 More than £17m of government funding has been secured over the next four years to create a global hub for agricultural engineering and precision farming, as part of the government’s UK strategy for agricultural technologies. The Agri-EPI Centre aims to become a world-leading centre for excellence for the livestock, arable, aquaculture and horticulture sectors.