Sustainable Agriculture and Food Production University of Leeds

Overview

Society is dependent on our ability to produce sufficient, nutritious food through agriculture. However farming practices have detrimental impacts on our environments, global biodiversity and climate. The increasing importance of sustainable agriculture and food production is driven by the triple threat of growing global population, rising pressure on our environment and a changing climate.

Key Features

• With the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Production programme from University of Leeds, you’ll be taught the fundamentals of sustainable agriculture and food production from a wide range of perspectives, before moving on to cutting edge research topics. This will include an array of agricultural innovations, including environmental management and monitoring, sustainable livestock production, genome engineering and crop biotechnology.
• As well as being exposed to the latest research in sustainable agriculture, with a significant component of practical work, field skills and training in relevant techniques, you’ll build a wealth of transferable research skills. This will prepare you for your advanced research project, working under the supervision of a world-leading academic or industrial expert. We also encourage work-embedded research projects with food production-related organisations globally.
• The Sustainable Agriculture and Food Production course from University of Leeds will prepare you for both PhD study and employment in a large range of industries that support agriculture and food production, propelling you into roles such as consultancy, policy, scientific monitoring and biotech, to name just a few. More generally, your skills would align strongly with a wealth of opportunities in business and government around sustainability, climate mitigation, decarbonisation and circular economies.

Career opportunities

The programme would align very strongly with the wide range of industries that support agriculture and food production, and with career paths in those industries. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Agricultural and/or environmental consultancy
• Agricultural advisory and policy organisations (Natural England, Farming Advice Service, DEFRA)
• Environmental and agricultural monitoring
• Agro-chemicals (Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, etc.)
• Plant biotechnology and crop breeding (KWS, Limagrain, RAGT, etc.)
• Agronomy
• Feed companies (i.e. for livestock)
• Agricultural equipment (particularly instrumentation)