About Us

Rothamsted is the longest running agricultural research station in the world, providing cutting-edge science and innovation for nearly 170 years.

Our mission is to deliver the knowledge and new practices to increase crop productivity and quality and to develop environmentally sustainable solutions for food and energy production.

No single approach can deliver sustainable agriculture with high productivity and value. A broad perspective that encompasses the whole plant system is needed and a careful balance of approaches is required. Rothamsted integrates biotechnology with other areas of science such as agronomy and agro-ecology so both existing and new knowledge can be implemented through agricultural practice.

Our strength therefore lies in our integrated, multidisciplinary approach to research in plant and soil science.

Patron: Her Majesty the Queen

Rothamsted Research supports around 350 scientists (including 50 visiting scientists), 150 administrative staff and 60 PhD students and has three main campuses:

Brooms Barn
Brooms Barn

Broom's Barn (Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk) is the UK's national centre for sugar beet research. It is located 20 miles east of Cambridge and focuses its research on developing, enhancing and protecting the root crop and exploiting the unique properties of sugar beet and works closely with growers and industry. For example, Broom's Barn has well-established relationships with British Sugar, the NFU and the British Beet Research Organisation.

The purpose-built facilities at Broom's Barn include laboratories for molecular biology, plant pathology and plant physiology as well as glasshouse and controlled-environment rooms. There is a 120ha experimental farm with irrigation and plot covering tunnels for drought tolerance experiments, as well as specialist facilities for field studies of pests and diseases.


North Wyke
North Wyke

North Wyke (Okehampton, Devon) has 250ha grassland and is globally unique in that it can provide the research community access to a range of in situ state-of-the-art instrumentation in hydrologically isolated fields and farms to better address key issues in sustainable agriculture. It contains a Farm Platform of three independent 25-hectare farmlets to allow theories and technologies to be tested at the whole- farm level. The Farm Platform will be a focal point of collaborative agricultural research with UK laboratories and offshore universities

A publicly accessible Farm Platform website is under development to provide a portal to documentation, experimental calendars, protocols as well as information about how new studies can be initiated. A data retrieval and analysis web site with user access controls will be developed which will form the repository of data for access by the user community.

› More information about North Wyke can be found here.

Harpenden
Rothamsted - Centenary Building

Rothamsted (Harpenden) is the main site where the bulk of the research and administrative functions occur. It comprises of 400ha land (mainly wheat research) and a series of state-of the art facilities for plant bioscience including modern lab space, and facilities for bioimaging, microscopy, molecular analysis, metabolomics, proteomics, and an environment-controlled building with 16 cabinets and eight growth rooms, as well as containment facilities and insectary unit that features the UK's most extensive aphid collection and over 1000m2 of glasshouse space. Rothamsted also houses a unique experimental system and an archive of soil and plant samples which has been running since the mid-19th Century.

 

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