Cranfield University

About

Cranfield has substantive worldwide recognition by industry, government and academe for our research and teaching in food biosciences, soil, digital and sustainability.

We have in depth understanding of the challenges facing the agricultural sector and are expert in using the latest technical thinking to develop implementable, practical solutions that balance short-term economic need with long-term strategic aims.

We work with partners to address the interconnected challenges of sustainability, productivity, and profitability:

• Delivering on Net Zero and preparing for ELMS through better use of resources and optimising land management decisions (including sustainable soils, C-sequestration, biodiversity and water regulation)
• Reducing food loss, spoilage and waste through improved storage, post-harvest management and control of fungal disease.
• Increasing resilience and improving yield in crops, using innovative plant and seed breeding technologies (in state of art plant growth facilities) and directly linked bioinformatic studies
• Understanding crop variability through remote sensing and precision agriculture
• Extracting and combining information from multi-scaled data (such as UAVs, aeroplanes, earth observation satellites and lab-based instruments), and transforming this into simple tools for farm and field scale decision making.

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 environmental domains 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.