There will be many interesting tasks in the New Year

We are now starting on a fresh, new year. 2019 is emerging as an exciting year on several fronts. Fortunately, most of our upcoming challenges are good, but we cannot ignore that there are a few dark clouds on the horizon. 

In the first half of the year, we will be spending a lot of time working on AGRO’s strategy for 2020-2025. This is a long but interesting and fruitful process. Our strategy must be visionary and ambitious and reflect society’s demands for sustainable food production and consumption, circular bioeconomy, and climate action, among other things. 

We began the process last year with, among things, the junior VIP and seniorVIP meetings in the autumn. At these meetings, there were lots of really good ideas for visions and for how we can contribute to the UN sustainable development goals and integrate them into ST's new strategy. The fact that these goals will be an integral part of our strategy is a good thing, because they align perfectly with AGRO’s research areas. 

The next task in the strategy process is to write a self-evaluation report about the department. The self-evaluation will include descriptions of the research efforts in the sections, and the sections are already working on that. An external panel will have the task of evaluating the department on the basis of our self-evaluation and a visit to us in May. 

You can see the schedule for the relevant parts of the strategy process here. 

JuniorVIPs in action

I would like to thank both juniorVIP and seniorVIP for their good input to the strategy process. With regard to juniorVIP, I am also pleased to note that we have a very active, inventive and committed group of PhD students and postdocs. 

They have demonstrated this with their many good and comprehensive ideas at the juniorVIP meeting, but also later on, when they contributed constructive and visionary thoughts and ideas to the debate about how the Foulum of the future should be. They have also contributed several other ideas for new incentives, including a PhD course about the concept agroecology. I would like to praise our juniorVIP for their initiative and encourage them to continue their positive and energetic efforts. 

Relocations and the Foulum of the future

The announced changes in the conditions in Foulum have been on the minds of many employees in Foulum. The debate about these changes has several aspects. Part of the exercise aims at saving rent here and now. We are therefore working on finding out how we can adjust our physical presence in the buildings so that we can cancel the leases on some of them. The other aspect of the debate reaches further into the future and requires visionary thinking on all levels of the university. This part of the discussion is all about how the Foulum of the future will take shape. 

You can read about the Foulum of the future in the article ’Moving closer to each other…’ here.  

Agricultural science is one of the areas in which Aarhus University consistently makes it into the global top ten and the activities in Foulum are known and respected by most people in the agricultural sector, but also by many other citizens. It would be a shame to reduce our activities, not least in consideration of how strong a focus there is these days on our key areas such as sustainable food production, climate and circular bioeconomy. 

We must formulate a strong and far-sighted vision for AU Foulum, so that we can continue contributing world-class knowledge for policy support, industrial collaboration, education and solutions to the UN sustainable development goals. 

Better conditions for our students

Our students in Aarhus will also see changes in the New Year. The agricultural science students will be moving into the university park where they will be part of a life science cluster together with, among others, biology students. At the present there are approximately 230 students registered on the agricultural science programmes, so there are good possibilities for creating a cosy and coherent student environment with fewer dropouts. 

The chairman of AGRO’s education committee, Bernd Wollenweber, and student counsellor Rasmus Pedersen are working on organising a housewarming event to mark the move. Stay tuned for more info!  

We need to keep watch on our finances

Now back to the dark clouds on the horizon that I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Our finances are still haunting us to a certain extent but we have made a big effort to have more control of the situation. The budget has been by all the sections twice and now, for the first time in many years, we have almost complete staffing plans before New Year. I would like to thank the section managers, project finance administrators and secretaries for their positive collaboration. The result should be that we see fewer uncomfortable surprises in the course of the year. 

This does not mean that we can give ourselves free rein. We will not be getting more money and must save on the internal funds. We must therefore apply for external funding to an even greater extent. If we cannot acquire more external funding, then we can end up not reaching our goals in the 2019 budget. In order to have a feeling for how well we are doing at getting external funding, we have decided that applications must be discussed at the section meetings every month. 

Finally, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year and express my pleasure that we do things well in AGRO.