Mr Eric Audsley
Principal Research Officer
Location: Building 42, Cranfield campus
E: e.audsley@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1234 750111 x2728
Environmental Science and Technology
Current activities
Eric's current research involves predicting the environmental impact of different farm systems, future regional land use and impact of future socio-economic scenarios. Recent and current projects include a Life Cycle Inventory Analysis (LCA) of ten agricultural commodities: wheat, oilseed, potatoes, tomatoes, beef, lamb, pig, poultry, milk, eggs. The objective is to enable users to examine the data in an Excel spreadsheet and study the effect of alternative production systems such as conventional, reduced input and organic. He was responsible for the development of the disease and fungicide models and regular updating of the fungicide database in the ArableDS Wheat Disease Manager (WDM).
Eric is part of a RELU project evaluating the options for combining economically, socially and ecologically sustainable agriculture, developing the multiple objective aspects of Silsoe Whole Farm Model to integrate the attitudes of farmers, and the impact of measures to encourage biodiversity such as hedges and weeds. The model is also used to predict future agricultural land use and the implications for the environment, under future economic, technical, social, legislative and climate scenarios, in the UK (AgFutures, $100 barrel of oil, REGIS, MULINO) and Europe (ACCELERATES).
Clients
- Dept of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK Government
- NERC
- ADAS
- AEA
- Manchester Business School
- Genesis Faraday
Background
Since graduating from Oxford with a mathematics degree and Hull with an operational research degree, Eric worked for 34 years at Silsoe Research Institute, formerly the Agricultural Research Council’s National Institute of Agricultural Engineering, until its closure in 2005. He has developed the application of mathematical and operational research techniques to the analysis of decisions concerning a very wide range of agricultural systems. One of the major areas he has developed is the application of multiple objective linear programming to whole farm modelling to determine optimum profitable and environmental systems and then its use in land use prediction. Models have been developed for arable, horticultural and grass farm systems. He has also developed a number of models to examine decision making with uncertainty using probabilistic optimisation models. He has since continued developing this research at Cranfield.
