Rural and Veterinary Innovation Centre, Inverness Campus
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00:00So what's it like coming from a big, busy institution, I suppose, in a huge city to
00:04somewhere like SRUC in the highlands? It's an adaptation, like any big move is. I think
00:12previously working at kind of big institutions, you do sometimes feel like a small cog in a very
00:19big machine. Sometimes you have to shout a bit loud to kind of get noticed. But having a place
00:25like SRUC up here, you have a small, very specialised team who are very skilled at what they do,
00:32who are very understanding of the local environment. So it can give you kind of more impact in the
00:38research that you do because you know it's impacting kind of farmers, aquaculture specialists
00:44and kind of local public health officials. But with the facilities we have and the kind of team
00:50we've put together, we can also roll kind of what we find out locally to kind of global
00:56problems, as we've discovered with kind of most of our epidemiological research, not only
01:03in the agriculture space, but also in the global health space too.
01:07Ravik's been open for just over a year now. And in that time, we've supported over 100
01:10businesses already. And we're 40% occupied in terms of the commercial space. We've had
01:16growing interest in the virtual tenancies that we offer through Ravik with NFU Scotland just
01:21joining in the past few weeks. With the results of all that, we've helped over about 600 or 800
01:27people through the door. We've done a whole variety of events from teaching ghillies how to deal with
01:32postmortems and look for health conditions in their wild-caught salmon out on estates, through to
01:39helping farmers with our SAC consultants around improved health and welfare for tail docking and
01:46lamb castrations, which is very timely this spring. Ravik has got very significant reach, so some of
01:52the research that we've done here is influencing health schemes and eradication schemes in Europe.
01:58This past September, we had an international conference with 200 delegates from Asia, South America,
02:04Africa, through learning about the latest products and service technologies in animal health and agriculture.