Star comment: Icing on the cake for Harper Adams

The agricultural college at Edgmond which has taught generations now has the ultimate feather in its cap after being awarded full university status.

It means a shining jewel in Shropshire's higher education now shines all the more brightly and will become the first university in Britain dedicated to agri-food science.

The work Harper Adams does is already renowned, but by becoming Harper Adams University it takes things on to a whole new level – a level on which it can look other universities nationally and internationally in the eye, work with them on the basis of equal status and compete with them on the basis of equal status.

This fillip is fully deserved as it comes on top of a lot of hard work, together with continual expansion of the facilities at Harper Adams and what it has to offer the students who flock there from far and wide.

Only in October Princess Anne came to the university to open the new Princess Royal Hall.

Now the hard work has paid off, it is time... for more hard work. That will be needed to build on the achievement and cement the role of Harper Adams as the key agricultural establishment in the country as the rural sector looks to the challenges of the unfolding 21st century.

But for the moment, it is time for a celebration and congratulations to all those at Harper Adams.

It is the icing on the cake at the end of a fantastic year.

If he were alive today, Thomas Harper Adams would be thrilled.

The college founded in 1901 that bears his name has done him, and Shropshire, proud.