Landmark Issue 19 2021 SINGLE PAGES

ISSUE 19 | 2021 47 RESILIENCE & SUSTAINABILITY grant income has doubled in the last year. However, to establish an institutional research base, our academics must be provided with the facilities necessary for them to be productive. The idea of a research campus has been born to transform our ability to undertake this cutting-edge research. We have the space to create an environment by reviving the old arboretum and gardens around the Garden House, and repurposing the ‘Food Centre’, a now redundant building, as modern research labs and a data centre. We have been given a modular clean lab that will house our new genetics facility next door and hope to invest in new analytical equipment, that are fit for modern science. The Garden House will become the University’s postgraduate centre, where students from around the world can work productively and share ideas etc. Our ambitions go beyond just buildings, as perhaps the greatest challenge to UK agriculture at present is to re-configure the use of our existing landscape to best reconcile the social, political and production-based objectives of our time following Brexit and responding to climate change. To do this the University has plans to create a “Living Land Lab”- possibly the first in the world - where we will use our surrounding landscape (in cultivation at least since Cirencester was the second city of Roman Britain) for research innovations. Working with Farm491, we plan to use the space to offer it up to innovators with the opportunity to work with RAU academics to create new ways to deliver smart agriculture. Already we have several experiments ongoing in the Steadings – the field that is between Farm491 and main campus - and there are plans for future expansion. In the same way as 175 years ago, the world now faces immense challenges and the land sector has to find solutions fast. These include global food poverty, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and sustainable recovery fromCovid-19. Our research campus is the modern response to these challenges and will hopefully once again fulfil the aspirations of our founders all those years ago. “Our ambitions go beyond just buildings to create a Living Land Lab”