Scottish Enterprise invests £3m in agtech facility

Editorial Team
3 Min Read


The James Hutton Institute has obtained a £3m funding from Scottish Enterprise for its new excessive throughput phenotyping facility that’s a part of the Superior Plant Development Centre (APGC) in Invergowrie, Scotland.

The power is a part of a set combining superior phenotyping, automation, AI-driven analytics and a high-performance computing cluster that helps analysis and trade collaboration. 

The plant phenotyping platform is designed to create the managed local weather circumstances that crops will expertise sooner or later. It really works by integrating automated plant dealing with, irrigation and local weather management with superior imaging applied sciences to display screen massive populations of crops and choose these greatest suited to the long run local weather circumstances.

The suite has 4 climate-controlled progress rooms that may be programmed individually to achieve temperatures starting from +5°C to +40°C. The humidity might be set from 30% to 95% and lighting is supplied by a sunlike LED system.

As an open platform, it’ll allow nationwide and worldwide collaboration to draw initiatives that cross academia and trade and guarantee an entire sector method to a extra sustainable future for agriculture.

“This new facility accelerates the identification of key traits for crop resilience, yield enchancment and stress tolerance, local weather change adaptation, sustainable agriculture and precision farming,” says Dr Rob Hancock, deputy director of the APGC. 

“By leveraging Hutton experience in genetics, we’ll improve trade collaboration to deliver the brand new varieties wanted to help agriculture extra rapidly. The power instantly helps new developments in managed setting agriculture and vertical farming.”

The platform can even allow researchers to speed up the breeding and rising of local weather resilient and low enter crops and improve the APGC’s analysis on the problems going through international meals, non-food and pharmaceutical crops. 

“The cutting-edge amenities in Invergowrie mix modern expertise for the economic biotechnology and agricultural sectors and can assist create tons of of recent jobs, enhance productiveness and help scaleups to profit the Scottish economic system,” says Adrian Gillespie, chief govt at Scottish Enterprise.

“Our help will allow extra companies to make use of the amenities to translate world class analysis into industrial ventures with the potential to scale.”

Over the following ten years, the Crop Innovation Centre – of which APGC is a part of – is projected to contribute to over 900 collaborative trade initiatives supporting an extra 2,600 jobs within the UK, of which 1,760 will likely be in Scotland and 470 in Tayside.

It has been estimated that it’ll contribute over £900m GVA to the UK economic system – over half of which will likely be in Scotland.

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