David Christian Rose

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Verified

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• BA (Cantab), M.Phil, Doctor of Philosophy (all Cambridge)
• Chair (Professor) at Harper Adams University

Whilst research attention on the mental wellbeing of farmers is growing, there are few studies focused on young farmers. Our research set out to better understand the factors affecting young farmer mental wellbeing and help-seeking behaviour. We draw insights from a combined study in Ireland and the UK, supplemented by separate studies by the same...

The agricultural sector is one of the areas that has been highlighted as requiring a sustainability transition. For these kinds of transitions to succeed over the long-term, farmers need to be able to adapt to the required changes. Identifying which individual and institutional aspects are important for farmers' adaptive capacity and willingness to...

The global agricultural sector faces a significant number of challenges for a sustainable future, and one of the tools proposed to address these challenges is the use of automation in agriculture. In particular, robotic systems for agricultural tasks are being designed, tested, and increasingly commercialised in many countries. Much touted as an en...

Purpose: To evaluate the success of behavioural interventions designed to improve preventative animal health planning by dairy farmers in Wales. Methods: Interviews of farmers, veterinarians; focus group with extension officers; post-hoc written reflections from project managers; survey of farmers and veterinarians; farmer dropout analysis. Finding...

The dairy sector continues to face increasing scrutiny for its environmental impact and contribution to climate change. It must also address consumer concerns surrounding issues such as animal welfare, antibiotic usage/resistance and the ethics of intensive production systems. Advances in organic dairy cattle farming considers how organic dairy far...

Following the Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom's Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) began to "co-design" a new agri-environment policy for England with stakeholders: the environmental land management (ELM) scheme. ELM is the cornerstone of the most far-reaching agricultural policy reforms undertaken in the UK since the...

Cultured meat (CM), meat produced through animal-derived cell cultures, has garnered considerable media attention. At the moment, there is a set of 'loud' voices and particular 'grammars' that primarily dictate the current media framings of CM. To date, very little research has attempted to understand what the food and farming sector think of CM an...

There are few examples of where co-design has been applied to active policy development on the scale or level of complexity of England’s post-Brexit Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. ELM offers a fascinating ‘laboratory’ to analyse how co-design at this scale works in practice. This paper offers the first in-depth empirical assessment of...

This report explores what UK farmers think about cultured meat and how the technology could affect them in practice. It summarises a two-year interdisciplinary study, analysing social media, discussing the technology with groups of farmers, working with diverse farm businesses across the UK, and modelling novel approaches to cultured meat productio...

Background The environmental and social impacts of cultured meat, and its economic viability, are contingent on its implications for food production and for agriculture. However, the implications of cultured meat production for farmers have not yet been thoroughly investigated and are poorly understood. The aim of this research was to engage with t...

Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) is one of the complex farm-based innovations that is receiving global attention in the contemporary period. We used a qualitative approach which tried to identify potential farm innovation brokers, along with analyzing the existing reasons behind the farmers’ trust in them. During this research study, 15 respondent...

Report by the UK-RAS on skills needs for agri-robotics in the UK

Johne’s Disease (JD) is an infectious ruminant disease that is prominent in dairy herds across the UK. JD can cause a reduction in milk yields, infertility in cows and poses a threat to animal welfare. Current extension and education efforts to tackle JD tend to be focused on engaging farmers who are already proactive and concerned about the diseas...

Many publications lack sufficient background information (e.g. location) to be interpreted, replicated, or reused for synthesis. This impedes scientific progress and the application of science to practice. Reporting guidelines (e.g. checklists) improve reporting standards. They have been widely taken up in the medical sciences, but not in ecologica...

Purpose End-user participation is often encouraged to promote the uptake of Digital Livestock Technologies (DLTs). However, managing participation during DLT development can be challenging. We explore how participation decisions can impact end-users’ engagement and attitudes towards the process, before suggesting strategies for improved management...

Animal welfare standards are used within the food industry to demonstrate efforts in reaching higher welfare on farms. To verify compliance with those standards, inspectors conduct regular on-farm animal welfare assessments. Conducting these welfare assessments can, however, be time-consuming and prone to human bias. The emergence of Digital Livest...

This chapter explores the social and ethical implications of scaling agricultural robotics. Despite the many promises offered by robots, a large number of social science studies have highlighted their potential to create winners and losers, which complicates the notion that their use will usher in a triumphant fourth agricultural revolution (see re...

Digital Livestock Technologies (DLTs) can assist farmer decision-making and promise benefitsto animal health and welfare. However, the extent to which they can help improve animal welfareis unclear. This study explores how DLTs may impact farm management and animal welfare bypromoting learning, using the concept of boundary objects. Boundary object...

Although there has been a recent surge in research on drivers of poor farmer wellbeing and mental health, there is still a limited understanding of the state of wellbeing in farming communities around the world and how it can be best supported. This special issue seeks to extend our knowledge of how a combination of different stressors can challeng...

There is consensus that we need sustainability transitions and increasing acknowledgement that such transitions should be conducted in a just manner. However, what exactly a ‘just transition’ means and how this should be brought about is less clear. Attempts to examine the justice of transitions to date primarily rely on normative interpretations o...

Poor mental health is an important and increasingly prevalent issue facing the farming industry. The adaptability of what we, in this article, describe as ‘landscapes of support’ for farming mental health is important to allow support systems to adapt successfully in times of crisis. The term ‘landscapes of support’ refers to the range of support s...

There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions. The transformation suggested includes rethinking how evidence is assessed...

There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions. The transformation suggested includes rethinking how evidence is assessed...

Prevalent narratives of agricultural innovation predict that we are once again on the cusp of a global agricultural revolution. According to these narratives, this so-called fourth agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is set to transform current agricultural practices around the world at a quick pace, making use of new sophisticated precisi...

An introduction to some of the technologies associated with the so-called fourth agricultural revolution and their opportunities and risks.

Objectives In this paper, we use a UK case study to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the mental health (emotional, psychological, social wellbeing) of farmers. We outline the drivers of poor farming mental health, the manifold impacts of the pandemic at a time of policy and environmental change, and identify lessons that can be learned to...

The effects of changing geopolitics, demographic change, and COVID-19 have caused significant disruption to labour in the agricultural sector around the world. In the UK, the challenges to free movement of labour and safe working conditions caused by COVID-19 have exacerbated the labour shortage caused by Brexit. In these circumstances, the use of...

Agriculture is facing increasing challenges as a result of climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and demographic change. Yet, at the same time, currently dominant agricultural practices contribute to exacerbate these challenges. It is therefore widely recognized that there is a need for an agricultural sustainability transit...

A short guide illustrating the value of research to policy-makers with tips on science communication.

It is widely recognized that there is a global need for a transition towards more sustainable forms of agriculture. In order for such a transition to be socially sustainable, its input (problem and goal formulation), output (policy instruments), and throughput (processes) need to be perceived as legitimate. However, we currently know relatively lit...

This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) concerning quests for responsible digital agri‐food innovation. We present our interpretations of the concepts of responsible innovation and digital agri‐food innovation and show why they can and have been productively interrelated with social science theories and methods. First, each of the articles i...

Agriculture around the world needs to become more environmentally sustainable to limit further environmental degradation and impacts of climate change. Many governments try to achieve this through enrolling farmers in agri‐environment schemes (AES) that encourage them to undertake conservation activities. Studies show that AES can suffer from low u...

Accessible here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1eN-4yDvMIAC4 There is a need to identify key existing and emerging issues relevant to digitalisation in agricultural production that would benefit from a stronger evidence base and help steer policy formulation. To address this, a prioritisation exercise was undertaken to identify priority research q...

CONTEXT Digitalisation affects the agri-food sector and its governance. However, what digitalisation of the sector will imply for future agricultural policymaking remains unclear. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study is to develop and evaluate explorative scenarios of digitalisation in the agri-food sector of Europe that are explicitly relevant to...

Purpose To explore the perceived credibility, relevance, legitimacy and accessibility of videos and podcasts in farm extension. Methods A two-phase mixed methods approach consisting of a pre-COVID online survey of farmers (n = 221), farmer telephone interviews (n = 60) and in-person focus groups of farmers (n = 4) followed by an analysis of how vi...

Innovations have the potential to help us address and overcome many of the challenges that agriculture is facing today. Yet, at the same time, they have the potential to create new, sometimes even more challenging, problems, especially when they are not governed in a sustainable way. Governing agricultural innovation sustainably requires understand...

Autonomous equipment for crop production is on the verge of technical and economic feasibility, but government regulation may slow its adoption. Key regulatory issues include requirements for on-site human supervision, liability for autonomous machine error, and intellectual property in robotic learning. As an example of the impact of regulation on...

This report investigates how to include harder-to-reach farmers in the co-design of agricultural policy through the use of skilled intermediaries.

Despite the potential contributions of autonomous robots to agricultural sustainability, social, legal and ethical issues threaten adoption. We discuss how responsible innovation principles can be embedded into the user-centred design of autonomous robots and identify areas for further empirical research.

The rise in the demand for animal products due to demographic and dietary changes has exacerbated difficulties in addressing societal concerns related to the environment, human health, and animal welfare. As a response to this challenge, Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) technologies are being developed to monitor animal health and welfare paramete...

In this commentary, we explore the risks and challenges associated with Precision Livestock Farming technologies based on an online workshop with over 70 international animal welfare experts, policy-makers, NGO, students, farmers and industry staff.

Videos and podcasts as potential approaches for knowledge exchange with farmers: testing their potential role in ELM. Results from a literature review and an empirical study in England. Report published with Agricology, funded by Defra.

Changes in agricultural policy may have a rapid impact, even on landscapes which have taken millennia to form. Here we explore the potential impact of the UK leaving the EU as a catalyst for profound changes in the pastoral landscapes of Wales. Impending change of the trading regime governing agricultural produce, concurrent with public pressure to...

Decision support systems (DSS) aim to provide evidence in a usable format for decision-makers, thereby improving the prospects for evidence-informed conservation policy and practice. These systems are usually software-based either in computer or app-form, but may exist in other formats such as on paper. Conservation decision-makers are typically fa...

1. Despite aspirations for conservation impact, mismatches between research and implementation have limited progress towards this goal. There is, therefore, an urgent need to identify how we can more effectively navigate the spaces between research and practice. 2. In 2014, we ran a workshop with conservation researchers and practitioners to iden...

An online survey questionnaire of over 400 farmers was conducted by the NFU to explore farmers' opinions surrounding how the future Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMs) should look. The resulting report was submitted to Defra in September 2020.

https://theconversation.com/the-fourth-agricultural-revolution-is-coming-but-who-will-really-benefit-145810?fbclid=IwAR3R_cgMi7qQ6eTDpP6Tet9cjPu_HzXtUaJ8XbAdnUd3qgiaLwuid_uHOOE

Technological advancement is seen as one way of sustainably intensifying agriculture. Scholars argue that innovation needs to be responsible, but it is difficult to anticipate the consequences of the ‘fourth agricultural revolution’ without a clear sense of which technologies are included and excluded. The major aims of this paper were to investiga...

Three tenets of sustainable intensification should guide the fourth agricultural revolution: people, production, and the planet. Thus far, narratives of agriculture 4.0 have been predominately framed in terms of benefits to productivity and the environment with little attention placed on social sustainability. This is despite the fact that agricult...

With the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union and increasing pressures from climate change, English arable farming resilience is in a fragile position. Most Brexit impact assessments have focused on quantitative analysis, however here we take a qualitative approach to assess how future trade agreements could impact the resilience of the UK...

This report discusses findings from the study “Inclusive design of post-Brexit Agri-Environmental policy: Identifying and engaging the 'harder to reach' stakeholders” - funded by Sheffield University and undertaken in collaboration with the University of Reading. The study (Feb/March 2020) involved 25 semi-structured interviews with experts working...

This report discusses findings from the study “Inclusive design of post-Brexit Agri-Environmental policy: Identifying and engaging the 'harder to reach' stakeholders” - funded by Sheffield University and undertaken in collaboration with the University of Reading. The study (Feb/March 2020) involved a Quick Scoping Study of the literature and the in...

After leaving the European Union and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), farmers and land managers in England will no longer receive payments based on how much land they have, but rather how they manage the environment. The new Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme in England will reward farmers and land managers with public money for the pr...

Conservation Research, Policy and Practice - edited by William J. Sutherland April 2020

Despite claims that we now live in a post-truth society, it remains commonplace for policy makers to consult research evidence to increase the robustness of decision making. Few scholars of evidencepolicy interfaces, however, have used legislatures as sites of study, despite the fact that they play a critical role in modern democracies. There is th...

Agriculture 4.0 is comprised of different already operational or developing technologies such as robotics, na-notechnology, synthetic protein, cellular agriculture, gene editing technology, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and machine learning, which may have pervasive effects on future agriculture and food systems and major transformative pote...

As a response to the environmentally and socially destructive practices of post-war mechanization and intensification, the concept of sustainable agriculture has become prominent in research, policy, and practice. Sustainable agriculture aims to balance the economic, environmental, and social aspects of farming, creating a resilient farming system...

In a previous series of papers (Sutherland, Dicks, Everard, & Geneletti, ), we summarise the use of a range of social science methods in conservation decision‐making. Moon et al. ( ) claim that the special feature risks narrowing the scope of social science research and suggest that we presented a limited perspective on the field. They thereby crit...

Agriculture is undergoing a new technology revolution supported by policy-makers around the world. While smart technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and the Internet of Things, could play an important role in achieving enhanced productivity and greater eco-efficiency, critics have suggested that the consideration of social implic...

Sustainable intensification is a process by which agricultural productivity is enhanced whilst also creating environmental and social benefits. We aimed to identify practices likely to deliver sustainable intensification, currently available for UK farms but not yet widely adopted. We compiled a list of 18 farm management practices with the greates...

In order to make a difference, policies, innovations, and best practices must be implemented on-farm. This report set out to review the lessons learned from existing behavioural change work in agriculture, supplemented with insights gained from similar work in other fields. Open access here - https://ahdb.org.uk/knowledge-library/understand-how-to...

Here, we address flaws in existing approaches to farmer behavioral change which place undue attention on the individual. Rather, we argue for a more distributed understanding of farmer decision‐making behavior, which includes all relevant actors within a farmers’ “ring of confidence” in projects.

Hydraulic fracturing has provided a persistent, polarizing, and highly politicized source of controversy internationally and in numerous national contexts for just under a decade. This research uses hydraulic fracturing (i.e., fracking) operations in New Zealand as a vignette through which to understand the underlying causes of controversy and the...

Co-assessment for fundamental change: a reply to Salomaa - David Christian Rose, Gorm Shackelford, William J. Sutherland

In response to unexpected election results across the world, and a perceived increase of policy decisions that disregard scientific evidence, conservation scientists are reflecting on working in a ‘post-truth’ world. This phrase is useful in making scientists aware that policy-making is messy and multi-faceted, but it may be misused. By introducing...

Conservation scientists are increasingly recognising the value of communicating policy-relevant knowledge to policy-makers. Whilst considerable progress has been made in offering practical advice for scientists seeking to engage more closely with decision-makers, researchers have provided few tangible examples to learn from. This paper uses an Engl...

In 2008, a group of conservation scientists compiled a list of 100 priority questions for the conservation of the world's biodiversity [Sutherland et al. (2009) Conservation Biology, 23, 557–567]. However, now almost a decade later, no one has yet published a study gauging how much progress has been made in addressing these 100 high‐priority questi...

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision‐making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence‐informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global surve...

Decision Support Systems (DSS) can improve farm management decisions and offer the opportunity to improve productivity and limit environmental degradation, both key tenets of the sustainable intensification of agriculture. While DSS are becoming increasingly useful for agriculture, the uptake of computer-based support systems by farmers has remaine...

1. Interviews are a widely used methodology in conservation research. They are flexible, allowing in-depth analysis from a relatively small sample size and place the focus of research on the views of participants. While interviews are a popular method, several critiques have been raised in response to their use, including the lack of transparency i...

The use of decision support tools on-farm may help to deliver evidence-based guidance to farmers, helping to improve productivity and prevent environmental degradation. While much research has sought to increase the uptake of decision support tools in practice, largely by identifying desirable characteristics of system design, rather little work ha...

FIGURE S1 Flow diagram illustrating the survey methodology FIGURE S2 Ranking of barriers by role according to Human Development Index FIGURE S3 Proportion of different roles (Red: Policy position, Yellow: practitioners, Blue: Policy position) experiencing the barriers FIGURE S4 Proportion of male and female respondents to the online survey by ro...

There is growing recognition that the agricultural industry is undergoing a period of transformation to become a more information-intensive enterprise (Bruce, 2016; Wolfert et al., 2017). There is much talk of how 'big data' will help farmers and how an 'internet of things' will allow optimisation of inputs such as water, fertiliser, and pesticide...

Collaborating with communities: co-production or co-assessment? - Volume 51 Issue 4 - William J. Sutherland, Gorm Shackelford, David Christian Rose

A workshop held at the University of Cambridge in May 2017 brought developers, researchers, knowledge brokers, and users together to discuss user-centred design of decision support tools. Decision support tools are designed to take users through logical decision steps towards an evidence-informed final decision. Although they may exist in different...

Scientific knowledge is considered to be an important factor (alongside others) in environmental policy-making. However, the opportunity for environmentalists to influence policy can often occur within short, discrete time windows. Therefore, a piece of research may have a negligible or transformative policy influence depending on when it is presen...

Biodiversity and conservation data are generally costly to collect, particularly in the marine realm. Hence, data collected for a given—often scientific—purpose are occasionally contributed toward secondary needs, such as policy implementation or other types of decision-making. However, while the quality and accessibility of marine biodiversity and...

Article in Arable Farming (March by Teresa Rush) on our research on decision support tools in agriculture.

Decision support tools, usually considered to be software-based, may be an important part of the quest for evidence-based decision-making in agriculture to improve productivity and environmental outputs. These tools can lead users through clear steps and suggest optimal decision paths or may act more as information sources to improve the evidence b...

This is the accepted manuscript of a paper published in Nature (Rose DC, Nature, 2015, 522, 156, doi:10.1038/522156d). The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/522156d

Drawing on the “evidence-based” (Sutherland et al. 2013) versus “evidence-informed” debate (Adams & Sandbrook 2013), which has become prominent in conservation science, I argue that science can be influential if it holds a dual reference (Lentsch & Weingart 2011) that contributes to the needs of policy makers whilst maintaining technical rigor. In...