‘Our opportunities will lie in the challenges’

UCD’s School of Agriculture and Food Science has been the centre of education for Ireland’s agri-food industry for decades. Many of the school’s alumni are leaders in the sector today, heading up global food companies, research bodies, and semi-State organisations. Professor Frank Monahan notes that constantly evaluating the curricula has allowed the school to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to education in this fast-paced sector: “We have always been good at evaluating our curricula over the years and, at key points along the way, we have reviewed and shifted our focus. In the past, for example, our focus was on general food production, but we now offer degrees across the full food chain, including food science and human nutrition – from ‘farm to fork’, as they say. Within that, we also have more specialisation, covering areas such as agri-environmental science, agri-economics, food business management, ag-technology and smart agriculture. So, a broadening of the curriculum beyond agricultural production, alongside more specialisation, has ensured we are preparing our students for a wide range of careers in the industry.”
Flexibility around the delivery of this education is also something that has also changed over the years. “Online learning is something that has grown and we have introduced electives and options so that students can tailor their education. UCD launched the Horizons programme where students can take six modules over the course of a degree in totally different areas, like languages. This also allows students to take electives from the School of Agriculture and Food Science: our module Food Diet and Health is one of the most popular in the university – and this helps us to get the message out there regarding our agri-food industry to others in UCD.”

Learning versus lecturing

Frank explains that the way things are taught has also changed: “Today, we talk about teaching and learning rather than lecturing. This is a big shift in how we teach. All new staff here take a teaching qualification as part of their training. As students can access much more information online, we have to offer something more than information to make the courses worthwhile and relevant: whether that be group discussions or field trips. It has to be engaging for students. The other thing to note is that our degrees have always been underpinned by science and in today’s digital world, with access to so much information, it can be difficult to figure out what is real and correct. While basic science doesn’t change much, applied science does and we try to direct our students towards authentic, trustworthy, peer-reviewed material.”
Frank adds that there are huge positives that come from the flexible learning that is offered today: “Online learning means we can have a much more diverse student base, our reach is broader and we have lots of international students we would not have had 50 years ago. I am also very proud of the gender balance we have here in the school: roughly 50 per cent of our students are female and the same for our staff in the faculty. When I first came to the faculty there was just one woman on the academic staff. This is a big and welcome change, and we were the first school in UCD to receive a Silver Athena Swan Award, which demonstrates our commitment to gender equality and broader diversity and inclusion issues.”

Research focus

Looking at how research has developed, Frank states: “Well, there is a lot more research now, that is for sure! I came here in the 1990s and, at that point, there was a real growth in investment, particularly in the agri-food area, driven by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM). Today, these projects are more multi-institutional, more multi-disciplinary and also multi-million when it comes to funding. For example, with funding from Science Foundation Ireland, the DAFM has just launched a new €35m joint research centre on sustainable food systems, which is co-led

by UCD. This Co-Centre for Sustainable Food Systems will be jointly managed by UCD, Queen’s University Belfast and University of Sheffield. The aim of the project is to bring together world-class researchers from the islands of Ireland and Britain to conduct research on areas ranging from food safety, production and governance to nutrition, plant and animal science, and behavioural change.
“We also now work with behavioural scientists and psychologists in the context of farming. What we have found is that you can do all the research, gather all the data and make all the recommendations based on these findings but if you don’t have uptake from the farming community and the industry it will have no impact. So, we work much more closely with the social sciences to tackle this issue and ensure our research has impact.”
Frank explains also that over 95 per cent of academics at the school are research active and this feeds into the teaching at the school, meaning that students can gain the most recent knowledge directly from their lecturers, and be involved in this research. 

Consumer trends and industry priorities 

Climate change and environmental impacts, Frank says, have to be part of the discussion around agriculture at every level: “Many of the projects we are working on are done in the context of the challenges we are facing regarding the environment and biodiversity, and at the same time ensuring that agriculture remains economically viable. All of these factors have to feed into everything we do. A lot of our research questions now are also influenced by industry and informed by the needs of the sector and industry, which makes our research much more practical and applicable. The consumer diet has changed dramatically over the years – we are far from the ‘meat and two veg’ diet of long ago. And consumers are much more informed about food, nutrition and production. So, we need to be cognisant of this in all that we do to ensure that our graduates are well placed for the wide variety of career choices available to them. I am always astounded at the diverse career options that our graduates take.” 

Looking forward

Concluding, Frank says: “We see our role here at the school as being critical in educating leaders for the agri-food sector in the widest sense and that includes our graduates being involved in industry, in research, in farming representative organisations, in science, in the media and on the farm. We feel very connected to farmers across the country. We offer programmes in agricultural extension and innovation, for example, training graduates who will go out on farms and help translate the science to farmers, which will hopefully assist farmers in adapting to the ongoing challenges they are facing. There is a lot of negativity directed at the sector and we need to be advocates for truth and sound science and, through this, promote Irish agriculture. It is very clear that we need to be able to adapt very quickly to change, but the opportunities will lie in the challenges, for sure. I can see growth in areas like forestry, horticulture and ecosystem services and technology; our fundamental production agriculture will remain, but there will be increasingly a focus on those areas.
“We will always need food and so our graduates will always be in demand. When we look to our alumni, we take great pride in where they are today as leaders of our agri-food sector.”