Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA) today announced the development of a new made to purpose teaching and research facility at the UTAS Newnham campus. Video Rod Thompson
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00:00 We've got 1,100 square metres of glass house and that's going to be world standard, much
00:12 better than anything else that TIER has currently got in the state.
00:15 There's a whole range of research that TIER would do in these sort of areas, including
00:23 new pasture species, doing research on waterlogging for example, research for annual horticulture,
00:32 research for parithrum, research for poppies and so on.
00:37 There's a whole range of different research and that's what will be the focus here.
00:41 It will better enable our statewide delivery of our research, teaching and industry development.
00:49 Because we've got all these facilities and the investment and a lot of research capability,
00:54 it gives students more of an idea of what's possible in agriculture and also gives students
01:03 that confidence to go out and try innovative things back on their farms at home as well.
01:11 The other aspect is having facilities like this, we could always get students to come
01:16 in and run some potential experiments with their lab projects or help out as casuals,
01:22 potentially in the future once they get to a little bit later in their degree.
01:29 There's that real practical aspect of learning, which a lot of universities can't actually
01:35 afford to offer.
01:37 That's really, really special.
01:39 That really makes it a destination for students.
01:43 Because they've got those practical skills, they're more linked into industry and get
01:48 that employment.
01:50 It sort of helps that transition as well, which I think is really fantastic.
01:55 A lot of students, if they finish their uni degree and haven't actually been out in a
01:59 paddock or had a chance to grow things themselves, then they haven't had that chance to put into
02:05 practice all the theory that they've been learning.
02:07 I guess a significant improvement on our facilities.
02:14 The labs and also the glass houses are going to allow us to conduct experiments, a range
02:20 of experiments that currently we're a little bit restricted in being able to do.
02:24 So we'll be able to replicate environments and weather events even that we can't do at
02:33 the moment.
02:34 So it's really, really important when we consider climate change and extreme weather events
02:39 going into the future to be able to replicate those conditions in a way that we can then
02:45 experiment with plants and see how they're going to behave under those conditions.
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