She’s arrived! Meet the newest member of the Edinburgh Science team, Elsie our life-size Ayrshire dairy cow!
Elsie will be helping STEM professionals inspire Scotland’s young people at our Careers Hive event from 28 October to 2 November as part of our Future Farming activity, funded by Royal Academy of Engineering Ingenious scheme #RAEngIngenious.
What is Future Farming?
Future Farming has been designed in collaboration with food sector engineering experts to showcase engineering innovations that are improving sustainability, efficiency and livestock welfare in agriculture and aquaculture. Many of these fascinating innovations are ‘making the invisible visible’ to farmers and food producers through data. These are just some examples of the amazing opportunities that engineering careers in this sector can provide. Find out more about engineering careers.
There are so many exciting career stories in food production and engineering – engineers are working with producers to develop amazing problem-solving innovations like:
- Software that monitors the moods of animals to give farmers an early warning of illness in their herds
- A ‘doorbell’ that helps fish to open gates in canals
- Instruments that can measure the sweetness of a blueberry without even breaking it’s skin
These are just a few of the engineering innovations that we’ve discovered while working with expert consultants to develop our Royal Academy of Engineering Ingenious scheme funded Future Farming activity for Careers Hive 2024.
Activity descriptor
This newly designed activity – Future Farming highlights engineering advancements that enhance sustainability, efficiency, and animal welfare in agriculture and aquaculture by ‘making the invisible visible’ to farmers and food producers. Participants will test mood recognition technology being using by livestock farmers to give early warnings of illness in animals, whilst discovering other ways livestock are monitored from our life-size model Scottish dairy cow. They will use instruments from the fruit harvesting and packing industry to assess the sweetness of blueberries without even breaking their skin.
The activity has been developed in collaboration with engineers from aquaculture and agriculture and funded by RAEng Ingenious fund.
We’re very grateful to collaborating experts Dr Cynthia Naydani of University of Edinburgh, Dave Scott of Intelligent Growth Systems, Dr Kenneth Loades of James Hutton Institute and SEFARI Gateway, Chris Jones, Director of Norfab Equipment Ltd, Dr Susannah Bolton of SRUC and farming technology specialist Ross Robertson for sharing their time and career insights with us.
We’ve been really inspired by working together and can’t wait to share that inspiration with students at Careers Hive!
Get involved
If you’re interested in volunteering at Careers Hive and can commit to at least one full day or two half-days between Mon 28 Oct – Sat 2 Nov, then please complete our volunteer application form.
