AgResearch acting chief executive Tony Hickmott says its Ruakura, Grasslands Palmerston North, Lincoln and Invermay campuses have closed.
Essential farm and research staff responsible for animal welfare are still working on farms and centres.
AgReseach is working with relevant government agencies to confirm areas of its science capability that are essential and how they can best be maintained.
The lockdown has affected delivery of its science programmes.
“This was an inevitable outcome. However, as much as possible in the circumstances we are working to mitigate the impact while accepting significant amounts of experimental work may have to be restarted at a later date – and not delivered to planned deadlines,”Hickmott said.
Almost all lab and field research by Plant and Food Research has also stopped, chief scientist Professor Richard Newcomb says, though it has authority to maintain and protect vital biological assets and datasets that underpin the long-term success of its primary sector partners.
It also has permission to continue some biosecurity surveillance and monitoring.
“Every activity we undertake in these areas has a detailed set of operating procedures designed to ensure that our staff do not create a transmission risk to others in their community and that they themselves are safe.”
Plant and Food is being run as a virtual institute.
“The focus of many of our research teams is moving to what can be achieved through working from home. We envisage that we will be doing more work around planning, data management and analysis and writing reports, publication and grants. And we are all learning to stay connected and work digitally.”
Newcomb says the lockdown will have an effect on the research it provides.
“For some areas this could mean missing a year of data where seasonality is important while for other areas the impact will be less. How quickly we can all get up and running after the lockdown will be important.”
Though there will be some effect on Plant and Food’s research the lockdown has promoted the importance of food, in terms of both what we grow for ourselves and share with the world.
“Every country needs food supply chains to remain open over this critical time.
“New Zealand’s expertise in high-quality food production systems, food technologies and our highly regarded food products could well be in even greater demand at the other end of this than when we went in.
“And we’ll need world class rresearch and development to keep us at the leading edge.”
Scion chief operating officer Bart Challis says its researchers are at home working in areas like writing papers and reports plus data analysis, experimental planning and literature reviews.
Collaboration with overseas scientists is also continuing.
Lab and field work has been delayed but Challis is relatively confident that loss of field or experimental data can be mitigated as Scion plans future work.
Scion has provided a list of its capabilities – people, equipment and consumables – that could be used to increase the national capacity for covid-19 testing.
“Our biosecurity and rural fire research capability and expertise have been flagged as possible essential services should the need arise.
“We have identified packaging testing and 3D printing as capabilities that could be needed if there were challenges to packaging supply chains or packaging failures as well as the need to potentially produce parts for ventilators or personal protective equipment, in the case of 3D printing.”
