The University of Alberta was created by an act of the 1906 Alberta legislature, according to its past-presidents page, and has five campuses in Edmonton and Camrose. Its South Campus in Edmonton holds land for agricultural research.
The Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences (ALES) has four departments: Agricultural, Food & Nutritional Science; Human Ecology; Renewable Resources; and Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology. It offers more than 40 undergraduate and graduate programmes. The faculty says it has 25,000 acres of farm and ranch land across Alberta and $48M in external research funding a year. Its facilities include the Dairy Research and Technology Centre, with about 150 Holstein cows; the 5,000-hectare Mattheis Research Ranch; the Roy Berg Kinsella Research Station for beef cattle breeding; and the Breton Plots, long-term experiments on Gray Luvisol soils. Agri-Food Discovery Place, a pilot processing plant, supports work on meat safety and precision fermentation, and a fee-for-service analytical laboratory serves industry and government. The university reports more than 130 active spinoffs.