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Cranfield University

For the past 50 years, Cranfield has been contributing to enhancing natural capital and ensuring that global food systems are more resilient for the future. We are recognised worldwide by industry, government and academe for our research and teaching in plants, soil, water and air.

We believe that environmental problems can be alleviated through technological innovation and risk management. Cranfield academics are leading a new four-year programme investigating the role of digital data in improving our understanding of environmental change, after being appointed Constructing a Digital Environment Champions by the National Environment Research Council (NERC).

Cranfield is a key partner in two of the four UK Government-sponsored Agri-tech Centres – Agri-Epi (Agricultural Engineering Precision Innovation Centre) and CHaP (Crop Health and Protection), with over £13 million invested in new infrastructure since 2017. We are world leading in digital agriculture, using advances in sensor technology, informatics and data sciences to drive innovation. We are investing £4 million in a new building and Centre for Environmental and Agricultural Informatics. See a virtual tour of some of the facilities.

Our education, research and consultancy is enhanced by our world-class facilities including the National Reference Centre for Soils, which houses the largest collection of its kind in Europe and is recognised as the UK’s definitive source of national soils information, and our big data visualisation suite, which has tools to analyse big data collections including our own environmental data resources from 280 countries/territories worldwide.

Our living laboratory is a testbed for transformative technologies and new approaches to deliver enhanced social, economic and environmental outcomes in urban, transport and infrastructure systems.

Cranfield is one of six universities receiving UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) funding to establish Urban Observatories as platforms for research into future infrastructure, technology and governance across the social, economic and environmental domains.

In 2017, Cranfield was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for research and education in large-scale soil and environmental data for the sustainable use of natural resources in the UK and worldwide, the first time in the Prize’s history that an award has been given for soil science.

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Glasshouse facility at night

Glasshouse gantry facility

Last Call: HortQFLNet 2021 Funding Call closes at 17:00 on 6 August 2021

Are you a researcher or working within the UK Horticulture industry? Are you interested in UK Horticultural Crop Quality and Food Loss? Do you have interest and innovative ideas or solutions for improving food quality and reducing food loss for Vegetable, Fruit and Potato crops? OR Are you involved in the UK horticultureindustry and seek an academic partner to help resolve a production or quality issue? HortQFLNet is a 3-year BBSRC funded Network. Now in its second year, £90K isavailable to fund Pump Priming project applications in this call, 50% of which is ringfenced for ECRs. We anticipate awarding funds to 4-5 projects of up to £20K each. Each project will have a duration of 3-9 months. Additional funding of £10K in total will be available to support academics and industry partners to encourage co-development of project ideas.

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New Agri-informatics facility to help accelerate pace of digital agriculture adoption

A new £3.2 million Agri-informatics facility has today been officially opened at Cranfield University by Rt Hon. George Eustice MP, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Cranfield and its partners will use the facility to create innovative informatics to support novel business, management and policy approaches in the agricultural sector. It will be shared with Agri-EPI Centre, one of the UK’s four Agri-Tech Centres, which will focus on agri-tech research and innovation to accelerate the development and adoption of precision data agriculture and engineering technologies that boost sustainable productivity across the whole agri-food chain.

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Soil quality or soil health?

The term ‘Soil health’ encompasses the wider ecosystem services provide by soil and therefore is a better criteria for the sustainable management of soil than ‘soil quality’, argues Mark Pawlett of Cranfield University one of the authors in an article for Microbiology.

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Successful innovation fund open for further investment

A UEA-run fund that has already invested nearly £2m into innovation projects is opening up to provide further financial support to interested companies at two upcoming events. The Low Carbon Innovation Fund 2 (LCIF2) launched last year and supports innovative products and technologies and will have a tangible impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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2020 Funding Call OPEN until 15 January 2021

The Horticultural Quality and Food Loss Network, jointly led by Cranfield University and the University of Reading, is providing a range of funding opportunities to its members, including pump-priming funds for feasibility studies and preliminary data collection to facilitate new collaborations (with emphasis on industry involvement and multidisciplinary) including ring-fenced funds for Early Career Researchers (ECRs), Business Interaction Vouchers (BIV) and Networking Visit Funding (NVF). A total of £300K will be allocated over the next three years through a competitive transparent process. The awarding of funding is subject to applicants satisfying the Network’s Terms and Conditions.

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Digital Sprint to support greener future post-COVID

Digital environmental tools that can help track, understand and predict the effects of COVID-19 are to be developed by scientists across the world in a digital sprint organised by Cranfield University to offer a greener post-pandemic future.

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Cranfield University’s new test could guarantee the perfect avocado

A technique developed and tested by Cranfield University for measuring the ripeness of avocados using vibrations could reduce waste by up to 10% and help fulfil consumer demand for ready-to-eat fruit.

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Earthworm population triples with use of cover crops

Research from Cranfield University has found that using cover crops to protect soil and introduce organic matter increases earthworm numbers and provides financial savings for farmers. The research also found that the frost sensitive cover crops improved nitrogen levels in the spring and increased soil microbial biomass.

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See a virtual tour of Cranfield

Discover some of the facilities at Cranfield in the agrifood space by taking a virtual tour.

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Building Africa’s resilient agricultural future - UK/Morocco partnership announced

An international academic partnership has today been announced by Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P), in Morocco, and two of the UK’s leading agricultural research institutions, Rothamsted Research and Cranfield University. The partnership will be supported by OCP Group, which is one of the largest exporters of phosphate fertilisers in the world.

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We must preserve soil health in order to tackle climate change

"There are a number of steps we can take to protect soils including avoiding deforestation, introducing regenerative practices into agriculture, and reducing the pressure to intensively produce food by eating less meat and wasting less food. Taking these actions now and continuing them over the long-term is vital in order to preserve soils across the world and the critical role they play in the health of the planet.”

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Beyond farm to fork: new UKRI funding to address big food challenges

The announcement of £170 million of funding, awarded by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and UK Research and Innovation, will provide for 1,700 PhD researchers over 5 years at academic institutions all over the country under the third phase of BBSRC’s Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTP).

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£3.5 million climate change fund established to shake agrifood sector

The SHAKE Climate Change programme is specifically designed to attract entrepreneurs or start-ups who have developed early-stage science or tech-based ideas that can have a significant impact on climate change, as well as form the basis of a sustainable and socially responsible business. Ideas can relate to any point in the food production chain, which contributes more than a quarter of global climate change emissions.

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UKRI announces new Quality and Food Loss Network led jointly by a Cranfield Professor

A new UK network that aims to use bioscience research to address this significant food loss is launched today by UKRI’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

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Soil quality or soil health?

‘Soil health’ is a better criteria for the sustainable management of soil than ‘soil quality’

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