Park Farm

NIAB Park Farm includes The MacLeod Complex, our state-of-the-art glasshouses, outdoor ornamental growing facilities and variety and agronomy demonstration area alongside The Sophi Taylor Building, our BREEAM award-winning conference centre opened in 2013 as part of the NIAB Innovation Farm initiative.

Park Farm underwent redevelopment in 2018 and now features four new buildings with research laboratories and offices, crop and seed cold storage facilities, and analytical services laboratories. Barns 1 and 2 are home to the Official Seed Testing Station, crop characterisation, analytical services (including NIAB LabTest), crop transformation and UKCPVS teams.

The smaller specialist barns include:

1. Barn4, the NIAB Agritech Incubator - a purpose built facility for start-up agritech businesses that opened in spring 2021. The unit has five ground floor laboratories to cater for all types of requirement, from wet and dirty through to a clean space and one laboratory fitted out for food preparation. Rentable office and meeting room space is provided on the first floor, with either open plan or two-six people offices available.
2. Barn 5 is dedicated to larger field produce, and includes wash-out facilities, industrial drying ovens, an autoclave and state-of-the-art grading facilities or all available.