22 December 2025

2025 has been another busy year at the RAU - and this year has also been a very special one as we have been celebrating our 180th anniversary.

The Royal Agricultural College was established back in 1845 as the very first agricultural college in the English-speaking world and, to celebrate our 180th anniversary, we held several special events including a series of six free professorial public lectures which were so successful that we are just planning to hold more next year!

Dame Helen Ghosh former permanent secretary at DEFRA and the Home Office and Master of Balliol College, Oxford gave an enthralling address at this year’s Bledisloe Lecture on “Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reasons – balancing priorities and evidence in dealing with the most challenging issues in the natural environment”.

At our Friends of the RAU lunch in July, we were pleased to unveil “Aries”, a new commemorative sculpture designed and built by RAU alumnus Will Carr with assistance from Harlen Beales, a 17-year-old art student from Hay on Wye.

We also held a Heritage Open Day, opening our campus to the public in September, and a global online toast with our international partners in China, Sharjah, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, complete with a giant birthday cake!.

Seven members of RAU staff attended this year’s Education and Skills Garden Party at Buckingham Palace which was ‘a first’ and an unexpected delight. Two colleagues were also chosen to meet HM King Charles III, our Patron.

Earlier this month, Country Life magazine ran a six-page feature all about the RAU and our 180-year history, including interviews with students past and present.

As we have celebrated this year, we have also been pleased to reflect that the RAU is as relevant today as it always has been, and we are rightly proud the achievements, and very real progress, we have made over the last 180 years and also of the significant contribution our world-wide family of 17,000+ alumni have made as leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators in agriculture and the land-based sector.

At the very start of the year - to tackle the increasing adverse effects of climate change on UK farming - we joined forces with award-winning local regenerative farming business SS Horton and Sons to make our Coates Manor Farm teaching facility fully regenerative. Run by RAU alumnus Ed Horton, this change in farming system - which includes a more diverse crop rotation, a range of cover crops, grazing cover crops with livestock, and direct drilling - has enabled our students to gain experience in a wider range of farm management techniques.

The spring term saw our annual RAG Week with students once again taking part in the RAG Rally and heading to Exeter for a night out. Other events that week included the popular Tractor Pull, a clay shoot, and an auction and more than £15,000 was raised to be shared equally between Breast Cancer UK, SSAFA, and the Farm Safety Foundation/Yellow Wellies.

We were delighted to welcome Clarkson’s Farm star, and RAU supporter, Kaleb Cooper to this year’s RAG Week Tractor Pull, where he joined students Rose Geggie and Rupert Jones to congratulate them for being selected as recipients of the 2024/2025 RAU Kaleb Cooper Agriculture Bursary.

The bursary provides recipients with a £3,000 payment, as well as the opportunity to apply for a work placement with either Kaleb himself or one of his industry partners. We are looking forward to welcoming Kaleb back to campus again early in the New Year for him to choose two new bursary recipients for this academic year.

In March we hosted the Varsity sporting competition against Harper Adams University – the first multi-sport Varsity Day we have held here since 2009. It was great to welcome five busloads of Harper students to our campus and, although we were not as successful in the sporting matches as we might have hoped, we did ourselves proud and it was a fantastic occasion enjoyed by all! We are very much looking forward to travelling to Shropshire for Varsity 2026.

We also had special addresses during Women’s History Month including the Bishop of Gloucester (aka Bishop Rachel) who spoke inspiringly on prison reform, and Abi Reader, RAU Alum of the Year and Wales Woman Farmer of the Year, who reflected on the lessons she had learned from her career to date with commendable candour. 

In April we hosted a delegation from the Zimbabwean Embassy to celebrate our new partnership with the Women’s University in Africa (WUA) aimed at empowering women from marginalised communities through horticulture and agricultural education. Centred on our RAU Foundation Certificate at WUA we hope to roll-out the programme across all other Zimbabwean universities.

We were really pleased to have lots of entries for our Grand Idea Awards which returned this year. Winner Daniel Blacker, and runner-up Zac Costley, were announced in a special ceremony and Daniel is now working on campus with Padel X to transform our tennis courts into three Padel, and two Pickleball, courts.

In May, after an exciting RAU Students’ Union election campaign, we were delighted to announce Robin Brown as the SU president for this academic year, replacing Alexandra Godfrey who moved on at the end of her tenure in July.

Later that month we held the second RAU Staff vs RAU Students football match and, after last year’s Students’ victory, this year it was the turn of the Staff team to be triumphant, winning 7-2! With the score now at one all, we hope that the decider will be played in the spring of 2026!

Our overseas engagement has continued to grow, with visiting delegations from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and RAU staff travelling overseas to broaden and deepen our partnerships in China, Sharjah, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. We welcomed 25 postgraduate students from Henan Agricultural University, China on a study visit this autumn, and will host our first cohort of 25 undergraduate students from the University of Al Dhaid, our partner in Sharjah, next August.

This year’s Graduate Outcomes Survey, conducted by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) which assesses the progression of final-year students 15 months after their graduation, confirmed a year-on-year trajectory of improvement for our graduates over the last four years. The proportion of RAU graduates in “highly skilled jobs” (i.e. those commensurate with graduate employment) has successively increased from 63.2% in 2020-21 to 71.8% this year – the latter being around 7% higher than the national average.

We were also pleased to be a finalist for “Best UK University Employability Strategy” at the National Graduate Recruitment Awards 2025 which “recognise institutions that go above and beyond in preparing students for the world of work”.

In this year’s Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF 5), we once again led the way, in our cluster of STEM universities - those institutions specialising in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for knowledge exchange within industry and the public sector.

Over the last four years, the RAU has been ranked either first or second in this group – a consistent performance since 2021 when the survey started – and we were particularly commended for our support for graduate business start-ups, the CPD we deliver, our work with business, and our public and community engagement where we contribute over £50M to the local and regional economy.

Another indicator of our research strength came from the annual publication of Times Higher Education (THE) Global Impact Rankings, a global survey of more than 2,500 universities from 130 countries based around the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The RAU submitted for three SDGs - Zero Hunger, Sustainable Cities, and Life on Land. For Life on Land the RAU was ranked in the top 200 universities worldwide, for Zero Hunger it ranked in the top 300, and for Sustainable Cities it was in the top 600 institutions.

Compared to the other players, we are a very small university, but these results underline our strong sustainability ethos, at both institutional and research level, and we are proud to be recognised in these rankings for punching above our weight.

The RAU was short-listed for the third year running in this year’s national What Uni Student Choice Awards (the largest exclusively student-voted awards in the UK) and in May we were awarded Silver for the small specialist university of the year 2025.

Our vineyard, where the grapes from which we make our award-winning Cotswold Hills wine are grown, has been recognised as a designated ‘Beacon Example’ of Sustainable Excellence by Wine GB for our relentless commitment to sustainability and student-led innovation. We were the first vineyard in the UK to develop the flat plastic wine bottle, the recyclable can for sparkling wine, and now the first paper-board bottle. 

Also this year, our RAU Enterprise and Employability Team secured top-spot in the ‘Enterprise for Good’ category for our Cotswold Hills Wine project, and a “Highly Commended” top three ranking (alongside Imperial College, London) for our Ignite Enterprise Programme in the ‘Enterprise Catalyst’ category.

And we continue to be proud of our RAU Catering and Hospitality team which won the national Award for Sustainable Excellence at the U Dine Network Awards 2025 which celebrate excellence in hospitality across the UK university sector.

The new academic year started in September with a successful and popular Welcome Week which included our annual Matriculation ceremony. This year the weather thankfully played ball and students were able to process down to the church from the campus.

Our new Land Laboratory Teaching Centre was completed on schedule and within budget - funded by the £5.8M (the maximum available) which we secured in the Office for Students’ first capital bidding round – and opened to students at the start of term in September, providing an integrated, state-of-the-art, facility in which to teach climate-smart resilient agriculture and land management.

We also demolished the old laboratories – believed to have been built in around 1936 – opening up a wonderful new space at the very heart of our campus. Our recent Green Quad Campus Competition sparked remarkable engagement across our community, with staff and students submitting a wealth of imaginative proposals for how this central space could be transformed, from innovative learning environments to vibrant social and ecological hubs.

At Graduation, musician and regenerative farming pioneer Andy Cato was awarded with an Honorary Fellowship of the RAU. Best known as one half of electronic music duo Groove Armada, Andy has transformed his career from international touring artist to a leading advocate for sustainable agriculture. In 2018, he joined forces with Edd Lees and George Lamb to form Wildfarmed, a regenerative food and farming company focused on bringing quality food from nature rich landscapes to the high street, and empowers farmers to adopt regenerative methods.

Andy was joined by RAU alumna, farmer, and podcaster Rebecca Wilson who was named as our second Alumnus of the Year. Rebecca, who is now a fifth-generation farmer on her family’s 600-acre mixed sheep and arable farm in the Vale of York, has also become one of the most prominent young voices in UK agriculture since graduating from the RAU in 2017 with an MSc in Rural Estate Management. The Instagram account she launched in 2022, which documents the highs and lows of farming life, has more than 50,000 followers and the fortnightly podcast she hosts with Cumbrian dairy farmer Charlotte Ashley ranks in the top 10% of podcasts for listens.

It was also a particular delight to welcome Professor Ihor Kovalenko, Rector of Sumy National Agrarian University (SNAU), and the first cohort of our SNAU students to this year’s Graduation ceremony. Our twinning initiative with SNAU - on the war front-line in NE Ukraine - is a role model for the rest of the higher education sector and earlier this year we secured a further £500K+ funding from DEFRA to help in humanitarian, teaching, and research collaboration support, examining the effects of war on agriculture, food security, and land health.

We are still awaiting the outcome of our outline planning application for our new c.£140M+ project to establish an Innovation Village that will support food producers, farmers, and landowners in developing sustainable solutions to food production while building resilience in rural communities. The application was submitted to Cotswold District Council last year and is long overdue but we are hopeful of a resolution early in the New Year. Centred on agriculture, food, and land management, our Innovation Village @ RAU will be a first for the UK and, when complete, will contribute a further £50M to the local and regional economy.  

Meanwhile, we have made a reciprocal commitment to research collaboration with Qingdao Agricultural University (QAU), one of our partners in China, which will entail a QAU presence in our Innovation Village and our engagement with their burgeoning China-UK Sustainable Circular Agricultural Technology Park. The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs is liaising with DEFRA on taking this forward.

Looking forward, we are scheduled, along with the University of Edinburgh, to be Co-Chair of the UK-China Joint Institute Alliance in 2026. Comprising all 57 UK-China University Joint Institutes, the consortium seeks to drive innovation and enhance quality in TNE in both directions.

We are also are hoping to lead the development of a Regenerative Farming Academy - as a National Centre for Agricultural Excellence - in collaboration with Regenified and aligned estates partners. We have also now received a Formal Letter of Support from the UK Government for collaboration with the Sharjah Government for a potential United Nations University (UNU) Institute for Agri-Food Transformation and Innovation. 

And we are pleased to have been invited to be a partner for Farm-Fest – a brand-new national celebration of Britain’s farmers and farming which is taking place at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire in late May. We hope to see you there!

2026 will undoubtedly be another exciting year for us but, until then, have a happy and restful Christmas and we look forward to all that the next 12 months will bring us here at the RAU.