Unit director Professor Frank Griffin said Ag@Otago was one of 15 specific research themes at the university, each supported by its own funding and designed to aggregate skills of researchers and scientists.
There were an estimated 70 university researchers who could contribute but Griffin said the unit’s approach to developing research programmes would differ.
They would seek input from a variety of farmers on what the sector’s future looked like, from low density, low input operators through to those with intensive operations and everything in between.
Those ideas would be compiled and after further input from farmers, a research programme supporting the goals would be developed.
“The challenge of the food industry is to go from the $6 a kilogram commodity to a $60 branded product targeted at the cuisine sector, not just trying to feed people.
“If we stay as commodity producers, it is a race to the bottom.”
But to achieve that Griffin said as well as the standard nutritional and medicinal information, consumers need messages supported by science that the food they are paying a premium for is sustainably produced, has a low carbon footprint, has little impact on water and comes from well-cared-for, grass-fed animals.
“This means changing our thinking a bit but we start with the farmers and I think they are interested in doing things differently.”
Griffin is a microbiologist who worked for many years studying tuberculosis in deer and Johne’s disease in cattle, deer and sheep.
More recently he was the director of Disease Research and one of its projects has been seeking ways to turn infections in livestock into vaccines by manipulating the host response to fight infections, similar to the focus of human cancer treatments.
Disease Research has also used university skills to support the release of captive-bred animals into the wild, such as Saudi Arabia’s efforts to re-establish a natural population of oryx.
Griffin said Otago University researchers offer a different skill set that has been applied to humans but is equally applicable to primary production.
It includes microbiology, neuroendocrinology, toxicology, reproduction, nutrition, food science, statistics, plant development, genomics and pathogens.
The university has also introduced an applied science in agriculture degree, which Griffin said is an extension of the agribusiness course being offered for NCEA in secondary schools and blends business, technology and environmental science.
