Stepping up to the plate Feeding the world is becoming a greater issue than ever before, but a new research institute at the University of Adelaide is rising to that challenge. The legacy of South Australian pastoralist Peter Waite has been reaffirmed with the recent establishment of the Waite Research Institute at the University of Adelaide. Peter Waite (1834-1922), one of the most important benefactors in South Australia's history, was the man responsible for laying the foundations of what would become one of the world's greatest agricultural science precincts, at Urrbrae in the Adelaide foothills. In a letter to the then Premier of South Australia in 1913, Waite wrote: "We have now reached a point when it behoves us to call science to our aid to a greater extent than hitherto has been done, otherwise we cannot hope to keep in the forefront." Waite gave the University of Adelaide a generous bequest of 300 acres of land at Urrbrae, as well as his beloved Urrbrae House, for "agricultural and kindred studies". His gift led to the establishment of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute in 1924, which quickly developed into a world-class research facility that attracted other non-University organisations to establish research activities on the site. Today, these partners include CSIRO, the South Australian Research and Development Institute, the Australian Wine Research Institute, Australian Grain Technologies Pty Ltd and the Australian Genome Research Facility. Now known as the Waite Campus of the University of Adelaide, `the Waite' ? as it's often