Agricultural Academies

So I've got some spare agricultural academies and am trying to decide what to do with them.

Anybody have any research suggestions? Richard took my research proposal for improved food preservation techniques, but booted breeding a better cow and a better chicken.

I wonder if breeding requires stud farms? (a stud farm for chickens? Almost Monty Python...)

As to the academies, could you play around with improving 'improved ploughs'? Or developing improved fertilizers or fertilizer techniques? or push technology and come up with the threshing machine 50 years early?

I do like the food preservation research, hope that is successful.

Yes, I guess you can only use academies for that kind of research, I actually was told I needed something like a stud farm for the other two projects.

I agree, a chicken stud farm is very monty python!  

I'm working on fertilizer and improved plough already, and was wondering if others had any other good ideas.

I wonder if I could have them study enclosures to find a way to do it that doesn't crash my economy...

A bit of a tangent but on enclosure, some time back (work related) came across this article

http://www.northumberlandnationalpark.org.uk/understanding/historyarchaeology/traditionalboundariesplan/briefdiscussion18thcentury

What I found interesting, and could be a research project for an academy, is the bits on boundaries; could be part of enclosure or simply as a research project leading to 'examples of best practice' for land management...and stopping your sheep from jumping over walls