2020 marks 70 years of excellence in Agrisciences for SCI as its food science journal and its Agrisciences group both celebrate 70 years.
15 January 2020
SCI’s peer-reviewed, Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture (JSFA) celebrates a landmark year in 2020, reaching the impressive milestone of 70 years in print. First published in 1950, with 15 issues released each year, the journal is currently publishing issues in its 100th volume.
JSFA has a particular focus on interdisciplinary studies at the agriculture-food interface, covering a broad range of overlapping research areas such as food health and nutrition, food qualities, food safety, food materials and engineering, sustainable production, agriculture and the environment, sensory and consumer sciences, and agricultural utilisation.
Serving a readership of agronomists, food scientists, agricultural scientists, biologists, organic chemists, and environmental scientists, JSFA is included in Index Medicus, an online curated subset of the MEDLINE bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information.
The journal’s Co-Editor in Chief, Professor Andrew Waterhouse, said ‘Scientific research is becoming more complex and integrated. The broad scope of JSFA opens the door to multifaceted reports that integrate large, interdisciplinary projects. We look forward to the next 70 years!’
Co-Editor in Chief, Dr Mark Shepherd, said, ‘It’s a privilege to be jointly at the helm of a Journal with its long history of food production research from field to fork. I concur with Andy that society needs trans-disciplinary research to address the complex challenges ahead, and that we’d like to see more of this published in the journal.’
2020 also marks the 70th anniversary of SCI’s Agrisciences Group.
This integral group, currently chaired by Dr Robin Blake, covers the production, protection and utilisation of crops for food and non-food products. The group is a unique multidisciplinary network involved in all aspects of food security and the bioeconomy, spanning across contemporary agricultural science and agribusiness interests.
The Agrisciences Group, which settled on its current name in 2014, has a rich and complex history, reflecting its multidisciplinary membership and the many developments in all areas of agricultural technology in the past 70 years.
When the group was first set up, research from the war effort had brought with it new innovation that bolstered the pesticide industry and laid the foundations for the modern pesticide industry today. Speaking at The Inaugural Meeting of the Pesticides Group, on 18 October 1954, SCI’s then-President Sir William Ogg, Director of Rothamsted, said, ‘Ours is one of the least static of industries [...] we must keep pace with the changes [...] or we will be failing in our duty’ – a sentiment that holds true to this day!
SCI would like to thank and congratulate all of those who have worked with both JSFA and the Agrisciences Group for the essential contribution they have made, and continue to make, in the areas of agricultural science and agribusiness. Here’s to the next 70 years!
Visit Blog