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THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW Highlighting best practice 18 | AGROVISTA UK A grovista, headquartered in Nottingham, provides expert advice to farmers on growing their crops and managing their business. With a national field force of more than 150, Agrovista agronomists are responsible for giving advice to around one-fifth of Britain's farmers and growers. Over the past 40 years, British agriculture has experienced some major low points in its fortune, from a depressed global wheat price in the mid-1990s to the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001. During this period, however, Agrovista maintained and developed its vision of 'growing through innovation', and continued to invest in its people, processes and technology in order to provide advice at the cutting edge of available technological development. As far as the future of agriculture is concerned, the devil is really in the detail. In order to achieve, and maintain, industry best practice, a number of critical infrastructure challenges have had to be addressed within the company over the years. These will be as, if not more, important in the future. We believe the following are the key issues: » Like most of the agricultural industry, a skills gap exists following a decade of low recruitment. This has been addressed through an aggressive recruitment policy, where Agrovista is leading the way, with over one-third of our sales force aged under 30. » The information superhighway brought information overload, and expert interpretation of this information into practical knowledge and its transfer to our remote sales team remains a key challenge. Each year, our Agrovista Academy invests over 300 days of training in the sales team, Agrovista UK » Established in 2001, from a merger of the Crop Care Group and Profarma Ltd » A leading supplier of research-driven agronomy advice and crop-protection products » Has the most comprehensive integrated arable trials programme in the UK » Has depots and regional agronomy centres throughout the UK » Offers a free-to-register cloud-based technical information exchange system » Carries out a significant amount of research at its many trial sites around the UK, both in small plots and at field scale ABOUT AGROVISTA UK Dr Tony John, Director of Strategic Development, Agrovista UK Agrovista trials open days – knowledge transfer to growers