- Integrated Pest Management

- Crop Protection

- Applied Plant Pathology

- Sustainable Crop Production

- Agroecology

- Farmer behaviour

After completing his PhD in plant ecology and pathology at the John Innes Centre, UK, Henry worked as a Researcher for the Organic Research Centre, UK, where he was involved in large European projects on agricultural systems including projects on conservation agriculture (OSCAR) and plant breeding (COBRA). He then moved to Teagasc, Ireland where he worked to improve IPM approaches to arable farming and increase adoption of best practice at farm level. In his current role at SRUC he is a work package leader in Scottish government funded work on IPM where he’s building on strong links he has with various research institutes in the UK and Europe. He also has experience of conducting cropping systems research in West Africa (Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau). In addition to his research commitments he regularly contributes to meetings of growers, agronomists and the agrochemical industry (e.g. SRUC open days and workshops; Farm Advisory Service, Arable Scotland).

IPM practices are numerous and varied, which makes them difficult to quantify. In search of a universal metric to gauge adoption levels of IPM Henry recently led a team of researchers in developing a survey and metric to measure IPM practices on temperate arable farms (Creissen et al. 2019). He is currently working with The Voluntary Initiative to improve their IPM plans based on this research. IPM plans are an annual requirement of farmers operating under quality assurance schemes such as Red Tractor and Scottish Quality Crops. This provides an opportunity to establish baselines for adoption levels of IPM whilst also allowing us to monitor changes in IPM practice from year to year, thus providing an indication of the effectiveness of R&D and Knowledge Exchange activities related to IPM.

Henry is module coordinator for ‘New Perspectives in Plant Protection’ in the BSc Horticulture and BSc Agriculture degree programmes and ‘Plant Protection: Integrated Approaches’ in the HND Horticulture and HND Agriculture programmes. He also delivers teaching content for the following SRUC modules: Agronomy, Advanced Agronomy, Plant Protection, Plant Biotic Interactions, Organic Production Systems. He delivers teaching on the University of Edinburgh’s BSc Plant Science programme and SRUC/University of Edinburgh’s joint venture, the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security BSc and MSc programmes. Henry also contributes to the teaching on a course leading to professional BASIS Crop Protection Certificate.