Richard is the technical manager at the University of Reading Crops Research Unit, where he has managed field crop trials for the university since 2005. Trials have included conventional and low input experiments, with cereals, pulses, forage crops and cereal/pulse grain intercrops. In addition to the field agronomy, he has developed equipment for field scale phenotyping and plot work and has an interest in developing solutions to mechanical or system based challenges. Prior to his work at Reading, he worked in rural Uganda teaching agriculture, developing farming systems and introducing intermediate technology using animal traction. His agricultural education was at Sparsholt College Hampshire.