Around 35 business, education and civic leaders attended the opening of a £1.7m precision livestock facility and a £1m Digital Skills Academy.
Tim Whitaker, Chief Executive Officer and Principal, Askham Bryan College, said: “This new high tech facilities will benefit our students and employers. Individually and collectively, we are all custodians for our environment and the demand for sympathetic management of that environment, be it for food production, environmental protection, crisis management or future planning, will be paramount to a stable, sustainable future.
“It is vital that our curriculum keeps pace and equips our students with new higher level technical skills that support the region’s employers.”
The £1.7 million precision livestock facility has been funded by the Yorkshire and Humber Institute of Technology.
Comprising a calf rearing facility and beef grower unit, and a teaching and learning space, the state-of-the-art equipment is being used by diploma and degree level students studying at University Centre Askham Bryan.
The facility takes a fully digitised approach to sustainable high welfare farming. Students complete research and make animal husbandry and welfare decisions based on real time data. This includes recording each animal’s growth and health including its food and water intake via electronic wearable devices.
The £1 million Digital Skills Academy is funded by York & North Yorkshire Local Enterprise Partnership through the government’s Getting Building Fund.
The academy focuses on equipping students, and those already in the workforce, with enhanced skills in line with emerging digital technology industry trends. The facilities include immersive technology such as virtual reality headsets, the use of augmented reality, as well as environmental management applications of lidar scanning.
David Dickson, Chair of York & North Yorkshire Local Enterprise Partnership’s Place & Infrastructure Board, said: “The Digital Skills Academy is an excellent development. It gives the current and future workforce the tools they, and their employers, need to flourish. York and North Yorkshire has ambitions to be a greener, fairer and stronger economy, and schemes such as these will help us get there.”
