Written by Ewan Pate, reporter for Farmers Guardian and SSCR trustee
The Scottish Society for Crop Research (SSCR) is known for many things but perhaps not for running any sort of social event. That all changed on November 16 when 200 guests converged on Dundee’s Apex Hotel for a gala dinner to celebrate 100 years of coordinated crop research and plant breeding in Scotland.
The dinner was hosted by Perth based comedian and former accountant Fred MacAulay. Schooled in Blairgowrie, he recalled his own early experience of crop research in the berry fields at Essendy and later during student days in Dundee as a potato roguer. During the evening, he also displayed considerable skill as an auctioneer pulling in the bids for a range of items and in the process raising almost £15,000 pounds which will be used by SSCR to promote crop science.
SSCR is a charity but one with a long history which can traced back to the early 1920’s and an initiative taken by members of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland (the “Royal” title was only granted in 1947). They knew only too well how close Britain had come to starving during WW One and recognised the need to increase crop production through better and more reliable yields.
The story of how the Scottish Society for Research in Plant Breeding started with a staff of only two scientists in a building at East Craigs on the outskirts of Edinburgh and transitioned through various iterations to become today’s James Hutton Institute (JHI) has been brilliantly described in a commemorative booklet co-written by former SCCR secretary Dr Bill Macfarlane Smith and Sharon Simpson, Director of Communications at JHI.
The booklet describes how the original Scottish Plant Breeding Station, first at East Craigs and then at Pentlandfield merged in 1981 with the Scottish Horticultural Research Institute at Mylnefield to become the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI).
The last amalgamation came in 2011 when SCRI merged with Aberdeen based Macaulay Land Use Research Institute to become today’s James Hutton Institute with a staff of 500 working alongside 100 PhD students. Quite an advance on the two original employees.
Welcoming guests to the dinner, Professor Colin Campbell, chief executive of JHI said “The farmers who founded this society in the 1920s knew science was the key to progress and their legacy challenges us to continue that mission today”.
“Globally we now produce enough food to feed the world’s population, yet it remains unevenly shared. Climate change compounds these challenges. This year will be the hottest on record bringing with it extreme weather events - flood, droughts and storms- that threaten agriculture everywhere. The challenges are enormous but so too is the strength of modern science.”
As agricultural research in Scotland has developed over 100 years so too has the independent charitable support from the Scottish Society of Crop Research. It now has 300 members (and is recruiting!), many of them farmers and growers but also including processors, end users, agronomists and scientists. It is a broad church well suited to running meetings and field events throughout the year. It helps finance scientific publications and vitally, it funds research projects of particular relevance to its members.
It is a serious businesslike organisation, but it can surely be forgiven for holding a superb social event every 100 years so. All the guest at the Dundee dinner seemed to think so!
