An Aberdeen scholar will turn the spotlight on some of the major challenges facing Scottish agriculture at an annual lecture later this month.
In the fourth Sir Maitland Mackie Memorial Lecture on Thursday, November 15, Professor Peter English of the University of Aberdeen’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry will talk on Rural Industry Training, Professionalism and Adding Value. He will focus on the government’s strategy to develop a farming industry meeting consumer needs.
While it is accepted that many new initiatives and support measures will be required to achieve the Scottish Executive’s objective of a prosperous farming industry, Professor English will focus on the need to strengthen both training and advisory initiatives in key integrative areas of livestock production and land use. Such provision he sees as essential ways to ‘add value’ to existing knowledge and technologies.
Professor English said: “With the challenges facing farmers and land managers becoming increasingly more multidisciplinary and complex, there was never a greater need for effective training and advisory effort to guide and support the farmers to address these challenges for the overall benefit of consumers, the farming business and the rural economy.
“Effective training and advisory efforts in key areas to enhance animal welfare, food safety and environmental care should be provided as a ‘public good’. Farmers are expected to respond to government directives to deliver higher levels of welfare, better environmental quality and safer food, but many consumers are unwilling to pay the premium necessary to ensure such standards,” he added.
Professor English has pioneered in a wide range of action research projects in recent years to improve training for livestock farmers and their employees and this work has exposed inadequacies in the existing support system. He sees the strengthening of the training and advisory support provisions to farmers and landowners as ‘enabling’ mechanisms to assist both them and their employees to help themselves and to make more efficient use of, and add value to, their overall land, labour and capital resources for the benefit of both consumers and their business.
Professor English is confident on the basis of his group’s research and development work, that farmers and their employees will put training and advisory support initiatives to very effective use in meeting both consumer needs and business objectives. He and his colleagues have been impressed by the professionalism of both the livestock farmers and their stockpeople with whom they have worked in their research studies.
These proposed improved training and advisory support provisions will also help to add value to the output and findings resulting from the funding invested in basic research in agriculture and related areas. He said: “The great weakening within the last decade of the applied integrative research and the training / farm advisory links in the chain between basic research and the farmer has resulted in considerably less effective knowledge and technology transfer from research to practice than in the past. This serious erosion of the well tried and tested chain of knowledge transfer from research to practice must be rectified as quickly as possible for the general long-term benefit of consumers, primary producers, and all those involved in the intervening food chain.”
The Sir Maitland Mackie Lecture commemorates the late Sir Maitland who is remembered with great respect for his outstanding contributions to agriculture, rural development, education and research over a long and busy lifetime. The annual lecture and an associated Student Scholarship were established through the generosity of the Mackie family at the time of the Aberdeen University Quincentenary Celebrations in 1995. The specified subject matter of the Lecture is a topic related to the stimulation of the rural economy in Scotland.
All those interested in the future of Scotland’s livestock industries and rural areas are welcome to attend. The lecture will take place at the MacRobert Building, University of Aberdeen, on Thursday, November 15, at 7.30pm.
Places are still available and anyone wishing to attend the lecture should contact Edna Watt, Department of Agriculture & Forestry, telephone: 01224 274230.
For further information contact: Angela Begg, Media Relations, on (01224) 272960.
Issued by Public Relations Office, External Relations, University of Aberdeen, King's College, Aberdeen. Tel: (01224) 272014 Fax: (01224) 272086.
University Press Office on telephone +44 (0)1224-273778 or email a.ramsay@admin.abdn.ac.uk.