Plant sciences

Our featured plant sciences work:

Agrecalc

Powered by SRUC, Agrecalc is a robust, consultant-supported carbon calculator that delivers clarity, compliance, and control by helping customers make confident decisions about their carbon footprint – whether they are running a farm, advising clients, or managing emissions in their value chain.

Visit the Agrecalc website

Principal's Research Group

The Principal's Research Group brings together plant breeding expertise from across SRUC to boost the productivity, sustainability and resilience of food systems across the world.

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ONE SeedPod

ONE SeedPod is a new Food and Drink Innovation Hub operated by Opportunity North East (ONE) which opened in April 2025 and aims to create a centre of excellence for food and drink manufacturing and production in north east Scotland that will deliver regional and national growth ambitions. The £27m building is creating a hub for businesses to scale production, develop new products, test innovative processes, and access industry expertise, entrepreneurial education and mentoring developed by ONE and partners.

Dandelion Project

With the aim of re-establishing Harvest as an event on the national calendar, Dandelion brought together community development, horticulture, live music, learning, sustainable thinking and innovative arts practice to support the people of Scotland to sow, grow and share together.

Learn more about the Dandelion Project

Vertical Farm

An exciting, innovative farming solution at SRUC King’s Buildings campus that provides students and researchers the ability to create, study and improve on the conditions needed for effective crop growth with fully-controlled and manageable lighting, irrigation, fertigation, and climate - improving upon and potentially redefining best practice standards in horticulture and agriculture.

Learn more about the SRUC vertical farm.

MI BICYCLE

Farms and farming systems in North and Western Europe are generally highly specialised, with little integration between crop and livestock production within farms and between farms within a region. Yet, improved integration, be it at farm or landscape level, offers substantial potential for enhanced circularity of utilization of biomass, especially for co-products (e.g. residues, manure, waste).

The main objective of the MI BICYCLE research project was to co-design locally improved, innovative circular crop and livestock systems in North and Western Europe.

Learn more about this project

ResidueGas

ResidueGas research at SRUC documented an improved methodology to quantify N2O emissions from agricultural crop residues management, including standards for estimating the amount of N in residues and improved emission factors for crop residue that include effects of residue quality, management, soils, and climate on emissions. ResidueGas further identified and communicated best practice for crop reside management strategies with respect to their net greenhouse gas effect in terms of N2O emissions and SOC storage.

Learn more about ResidueGas

Pasture restoration and greenhouse gas reduction in Brazil

The SAIN project considers the trade-offs inherent in the need for Brazil to sustainably intensify agricultural production to avoid local and global external costs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) from livestock production, deforestation and associated loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The project is based on the development of mathematical models that represent different livestock systems to identify optimal strategies for SAI; for example via minimum cost pasture restoration and avoided deforestation.

The Green Revolution

The Green Revolution focused on increasing yield, primarily of a few staple crops at the expense of research into orphan crops – crops which are regionally important but not world traded. The current strategy focuses on improving the productivity of orphan crops under the assumption that increased crop diversity will bring greater consumption. However, this may not be the case in rural or urban areas where traditional products compete with more attractive processed products.

Barley disease management research yielding results

Barley is the most widely grown crop in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, and the second most common in the UK. Diseases of barley crops are managed through annual application of fungicides to kill parasitic fungi and their spores.

Incorrect timing and the use of ineffective products can adversely affect yield and contribute to pathogens (bacteria, viruses, or other microorganisms that can cause disease) developing resistance to fungicides.

In the UK, the economic impact depends chiefly on the right selection of fungicide product; in Ireland on correct timing of its application.

The use of optimal fungicide programmes results in improvements to barley yields that have been assessed to be worth up to an additional £113 million and €18 million annually to the UK and Irish barley industries respectively.

You can read the research outputs from the case study on our Pure portal.

Refined greenhouse gas reporting refocuses policy on emissions from agriculture

SRUC researchers developed an interdisciplinary research programme, looking at UK-specific climatic, geographical and farming practices to improve the accuracy of greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting and help deliver policies for future low-carbon farming systems.

Our work has shown that soil-derived emissions of nitrous oxide (N₂O) are lower than previously calculated, but estimates for methane (CH₄) emissions remain unchanged. CH₄ has been shown to account for a greater proportion of overall agricultural GHG emissions in the UK than previously thought.

Our research results informed Scotland’s Climate Change Plan, which sets out the planned policies to achieve the climate targets, and influenced policies on nutrient management, soil testing, livestock management and precision farming. Internationally, our research has fed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's GHG reporting guidelines and has been adopted by international reporting of GHG emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

You can read the research outputs from the case study on our Pure portal.

InFaba

SRUC is playing a leading research role in a new UK-wide project aiming to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farming while reducing reliance on imported soya bean meal.

The InFaba project, funded by Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme and delivered in partnership with Innovate UK through the Farming Futures R&D Fund: Low Emission Farming Competition, brings together crop science, ruminant research experiments and on farm trials, underpinned by an environmental life cycle assessment and economic analysis.

Learn more about the InFaba project

Forgotten food crops

Award-winning work by SRUC scientists, together with researchers from the World Vegetable Center, Center for International Forestry Research-World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), University of Abomey-Calavi and National Taiwan University that explored the role forgotten food crops could play in supporting nutrition and climate resilience in sub-Saharan Africa.

Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa for healthy diets in a changing climate | PNAS

Forgotten food crops work wins Cozzarelli Prize | SRUC

UK-CMCB

The construction of the UK Crop Microbiome Cryobank (UK-CMCB) – the first publicly available resource of its kind anywhere in the world was completed in 2023 after three years of painstaking research involving SRUC.

The UK-CMCB project, funded by UKRI BBSRC, brought together experts from CABI, Rothamsted Research, SRUC, James Hutton Institute and the John Innes Centre.

It uses state-of-the art cryo research techniques to preserve important crop microbiome samples obtained from different crops grown in a range of UK soil types. The resource also includes living microbial material as well as genomic and metagenomic sequences (DNA) from the crop root environment.

Construction of world-leading UK Cryobank now complete | SRUC

Plant sciences research outputs