"It's going to be fun and it'll work.''
So says Prof Frank Griffin, referring to the new Agriculture at Otago (Ag@Otago) initiative, which will co-ordinate a diverse range of capabilities relevant to agriculture across a wide range of specialties.
It will also collaborate with agri-services providers such as Dunedin-based company AbacusBio.
The research theme focuses on enhancing agricultural productivity, adding value in primary industries and increasing sustainable and profitable environmental management practices for primary producers in the domestic and global agricultural sector.
A key priority was entering into a well-managed process of dialogue "to truly understand the agriculture industry's real needs'', Prof Griffin, who is leading the initiative, said.
The concept of Ag@Otago emerged about a year ago.
Every five years, the university had a set of research themes: areas where it wanted to encourage collaboration and inter-disciplinary teams.
When a new round of themes was pending, the university was very interested to look more closely at how Otago could essentially become a provider and point of access for people interested in agricultural research, Prof Griffin said.
Ag@Otago involved a collaboration between more than 50 researchers involved in land-based research at the university.
It was intended to take a dual approach: to look at existing funded projects to see how the disparate group could add value to those, and also to find some new and novel portfolios that could be developed.
The goal, initially, was to interact with the likes of producer groups and agencies and find out what their needs were.
"It's very much a model of us responding to need,'' Prof Griffin said.
It was hoped that within a couple of years, the "Otago brand'' would be sufficiently established that when there was a need for something, whether it was to do with carbon footprint or environmental research, there was a group of people with expertise that could contribute to that.
Prof Griffin believed it was very important to have external people involved and he was excited about having AbacusBio managing director Dr Anna Campbell on board.
Dr Campbell said the research addressed a "real need'' within agriculture to create value-added products in an environmentally sustainable way.
"The initiative is timely, especially given the university's reputation for medical research and the increasing recognition of the role food plays in our health and wellbeing,'' she said.
She will speak about Ag@Otago and AbacusBio's capabilities at the Asia Pacific Food Integrity conference in Auckland next month.
The Ag@Otago executive management committee comprises Prof Griffin, as director, Prof Indrawati Oey (food science department), Prof Richard Macknight (biochemistry department), Prof Hugh Campbell (Centre for Sustainability) and Dr Campbell.
