Imperial Agricultural Bureaux

The Imperial Agricultural Bureaux was an initiative taken by the Governments of the British Commonwealth who agreed to jointly fund a number of bureaux "to collect, collate and disseminate information on research in eight selected branches of agricultural science". On 1 April 1929 an Executive Council was created, which proceed to set up the eight Bureaux.{{cite journal |journal=Imperial Agricultural Bureaux Annual Report of the Executive Council |title = Preface|date=1940 |volume=11 |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.34702/page/n3/mode/1up |access-date=8 March 2025}} The principal role of help research workers in the British Empire to keep abreast of their subjects. This was achieved by{{cite journal |title=The Imperial Agricultural Bureaux |journal=Nature |date=1943 |volume=152 |issue=3869 December 1943 |pages=731–733 |doi=10.1038/152731a0 |bibcode=1943Natur.152..731. }}

• circulating regular bulletins and journals containing abstracts focussing on updates in specific areas
• providing information needed on specific points, with the corollary that the workers themselves must be aware of the existence of the

bureaux and have sufficient confidence in them to ask for this information

• by co-ordinating meet-ups of research workers whenever this attracted sufficient participants
• offering advice or accommodation to meet the needs of researchers

Following recommendations from the British Commonwealth Scientific Official Conference, 1946, the Imperial Agricultural Bureaux was transformed into the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux (CAB).{{cite web |title=Our history |url=https://www.cabi.org/about-cabi/our-history/ |website=CABI.org |publisher=CABI |access-date=10 March 2025}}