Rural & natural economy

Our featured rural and and natural economy work:

Rural Policy Centre

The SRUC Rural Policy Centre is a knowledge hub for rural Scotland. With it and through it, we engage and collaborate with researchers, businesses, and communities to exchange ideas, share experience and contribute evidence-based research to rural policy in Scotland

Learn more about the Rural Policy Centre at SRUC

Scottish Farm Business Survey

The Scottish Farm Business Survey (SFBS) is an annual economic and environmental survey of over 400 farming businesses in Scotland. It delivers an in-depth focus on the state of Scottish farming and creates data to support Scottish Government decision making.

Learn more about the Scottish Farm Business Survey

Mapping Scottish Landownership

With concentration of landownership in Scotland the highest in Europe, SRUC research aims to understand whether recent land transactions are leading to - and fuelled by - land use change, such as towards achieving net zero. The study also explores the influence of financial support mechanisms on land values, particularly the recent interest in carbon schemes.  

Item - Mapping Scottish Landownership (Research Briefing) - Scotland's Rural College (SRUC) - Figshare

New project to map landowners in Scotland | SRUC

Farm-twin

The world’s first open-source digital twin platform designed specifically to transform dairy farming by giving farmers an at-a-glance view of their entire operation using real-time data from sensors, telemetry, and other digital tools.

By replicating the physical environment in a digital space, farm-twin enables farmers to monitor operations in real time, make data-driven decisions, and optimise the use of resources.

Learn more about farm-twin's capabilities

"With innovations like farm-twin, SRUC are transforming dairy production systems and positioning the sector as a global leader in sustainable, data-driven agriculture."

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.

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

GreenShed

Greenshed is SRUC’s technologically-innovative circular farming system that uses cattle waste products to power a methane capturing system and grow indoor crops. It was specifically designed to retrofit on current cattle sheds in order to make the system economically viable to farmers as well as cause little to no disruption to animal routines. 

Learn more about GreenShed

SustainSheep

SRUC and the Texel Sheep Society have teamed up with partners from New Zealand, Ireland, and three other key sheep-breeding nations to provide a platform for national and global comparison of methane and carbon dioxide emissions for the purpose of selective breeding for lower-emitting animals.

Sheep experts team up to reduce emissions | SRUC

Dairy Nexus

A multi-million pound facility designed to facilitate collaboration between researchers, advisors, farmers, and businesses in the dairy sector to identify and solve real-world problems and take opportunities to improve productivity and sustainability.

Learn more about Dairy Nexus

Digital Dairy Chain

Offering any business or individual involved in the dairy supply chain across Cumbria, South and West Scotland a range of services to support innovation and productivity through collaboration.

Working with local and national businesses, the Digital Dairy Chain is transforming the region’s dairy production systems and establishing it as a global leader in advanced, sustainable, and high-value dairy manufacturing. It’s fostering entrepreneurship, creating new market opportunities, adding new skills to the workforce, and laying the foundations for more productive regions, all while making the critical journey towards net zero.

Learn more about Digital Dairy Chain

Peatlands project

SRUC is the UK lead in the EU-funded Horizon Europe project 'Socio-Economic and Climate and Environmental Aspects of Paludiculture' (Paludi4all) – the productive use of wet and rewetted peatlands.

Paludi4All aims to support the EU’s climate, nature restoration, and carbon farming goals by promoting the development of paludiculture through innovative solutions emerging from a network of practitioners and researchers.

Peatlands project to tackle greenhouse gas emissions | SRUC

UltraGreenCow

GreenCow is SRUC's innovative and award-winning research programme that's making a fundamental contribution to our understanding of Greenhouse Gas production by livestock and is a key facility in international efforts to reduce the impact on climate change from emissions by ruminants. 

The UltraGreenCow project will build upon SRUC’s existing GreenCow facility and is set to be one of the few locations in the world which can measure all emissions from livestock (including methane, nitrous oxide, ammonia and carbon dioxide). The increased knowledge of trade-offs between these pollutants will provide essential data for mitigation measures, such as feed additives, at a time when farmers are under intense pressure to reduce emissions.

SRUC awarded £700k to measure cattle emissions | SRUC

Pneumonitor

Pneumonitor is a full-scale, commercial sensor that’s helping dairy farmers prevent pneumonia in calves by measuring real-time temperature, humidity, pressure, gusts, and relative volatile organic compounds (VOCs) data - all at calf height within the pen so that farmers get the valuable preventative insight they need before illness can take hold.

Learn more about Pneumonitor

Qualitative Behavioural Assessment App

The Qualitative Behavioural Assessment (QBA) App, is a first-of-its-kind, award-winning animal welfare app developed by SRUC professor Francoise Wemelsfelder specifically created for the purpose of measuring the emotional welfare of farmed animals and fish. 

The QBA app, based on SRUC's novel animal behaviour assessment approach, challenges conventional assumptions that animal emotions can only be determined by its actions, i.e. what it's doing. Instead, SRUC animal behaviour and welfare researchers found that animal emotions can be determined by how an animal moves and allows users to compare animal or herd scores to reference cohorts and track their welfare over time. 

Learn more about the Qualitative Behavioural Assessment (QBA) App

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 to learn more

Coworking

A research project investigating the impact of remote working hubs has identified a potential blueprint for Scotland’s rural communities.

Scotland explores Ireland's booming €1bn coworking scene | SRUC

Rural and Agricultural Development

A report produced by SRUC has highlighted the unique role agriculture plays in island life and calls on Government to use this new evidence in policy decisions.

Report highlights unique role of agriculture in Scottish island life | SRUC

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.

Learn more

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.

Bioluminescent fungi

Amid the climate emergency, researchers from SRUC and the Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) St Gallen, Switzerland have successfully inserted the decay fungus Desarmillaria tabescens – a white rot fungus – into balsa wood to make it glow, with the aim of producing functionality.

Lightbulb moment for fungi scientists | SRUC

Dancing with Daffodils

In partnership with Innovate UK, The Dancing with Daffodils project, which began in 2023 and is being run by a consortium including SRUC, will look at research into reducing cattle methane emissions using a chemical from daffodils. Scientists have successfully extracted a chemical called haemanthamine from the plants and, using an artificial cow's stomach in the laboratory, have showed it could reduce emissions by 30% when added to feed.

SRUC will be involved in the evaluation of the newly developed feed additive and will also be responsible for assessing the dose of feed additive with the greatest potential to reduce methane emissions and improve feed digestion efficiency at farm level.

Flower power at heart of methane reduction research | 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

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

ResidueGas

Documenting 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

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.

Improving climate health and nutrition in Scotland through taxation

A 2023 study involving researchers at SRUC found that taxing foods high in fats, sugar and salt (HFSS) could potentially reduce emissions from food consumption, but it is unlikely that one policy could achieve both nutritional and climate goals. 

Could taxes on foods high in fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) improve climate health and nutrition in Scotland? - ScienceDirect

Could taxing unhealthy food help tackle climate change? | SRUC

The Facilitating Act Framework

Research from scientists at SRUC and The University of Sheffield has revealed how our relationships with nature, in particular the widespread women’s wild swimming movement, can be supported through policy.

New research takes a deep dive into wild swimming | SRUC

Rural & natural economy research outputs