Reading

We define resilience in the food security context as maintaining production of sufficient and nutritious food in the face of chronic and acute environmental perturbations. In agri-food systems, appro...

A country built on agriculture is seeing the sector change as the number of farms shrinks and it becomes harder for young people to buy land

A practitioner's response to Professor Dieter Helm's analysis of British farming

Farmers have recently been complaining about a lot, and in some cases with good cause. Brexit has created lots of practical difficulties, without delivering all the benefits they were promised. Migrant labour has been disrupted with as yet little sign that British workers want British agricultural jobs. The introduction of ELMs (Environmental Land Management schemes) […]

Perennial crops have a vast range of benefits, from carbon sequestration and biodiveristy, to nutritious crops for diversification of farms. Should we not have more?

The UK’s food system is under pressure.

From RFK Jr. to Hollywood A-listers and Democratic senators, people across the political spectrum are jumping onto the slippery slope of nature-based solutionism.

In this episode of Handpicked: Stories from the Field, guest producer Harrison Runtz talks with food systems experts Kelly Bronson, Irena Knezevic, and Carly Livingstone about how new digital technologies are changing the ways we grow and get food. They look at how big agri-businesses like John Deere create visions of a technological future of food, examine what Amazon’s entry into online food retailing has meant for small-scale and local food retailers, and argue for a more critical understanding about the impact of technological innovations on food systems. Together, they ask vital questions about who benefits and who doesn’t from new food technologies.   Contributors Guest-Producer & Host: Harrison Runtz Co-Producers & Hosts:  &  Sound Design, Research & Editing: Adedotun Babajide  Guests   Support & Funding Music Credits Keenan Reimer-Watts  Resources (Bronson and Knezevic) (Livingstone and Knezevic) (Bronson)  See also the     Connect with Us: Email:  Twitter: @Handpickedpodc Facebook:    Glossary of Terms Big DataLarge quantities of data gathered by digital platforms, such as Amazon or Facebook, and other technologies, such as remote sensing, etc. Big data can be sorted and analyzed in different ways to uncover important insights for decision making. For instance, big data can be used to understand consumer purchasing practices to inform marketing spending and business practices to increase profit margins.   Data Mining Extracting patterns and key insights from big data sets, often using statistics and machine-learning technologies.   Data Sovereignty   The right of people to have access to and power over the data and information associated with their lives, work, or communities.     Digitization The increasing use of digital technologies across sectors to make decisions and enable practices. Digital technologies include (but are not limited to), local and remote sensing technologies, digital platforms, big data, cloud-based solutions, etc.  Farming 4.0 Also referred to as digital farming, smart farming, or precision agriculture, this type of farming makes use of sensing technology and sophisticated computing technologies to make decisions about all aspects of the farm including crop choice, inputs, irrigation, and harvesting.   Food Policy Food policies are developed by governments at different scales to guide food-related decisions and actions. They inform and govern public, private, and non-profit sector actions related to improving food-related outcomes and can create opportunities for stakeholders to work together across sectors.  Food Security   Food security is the ability to access safe, nutritious, culturally appropriate, and sufficient food all year round. A person or community is food insecure when people cannot afford or have limited or no access to the food they need to nourish their bodies. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization state that “food insecurity can affect diet quality in different ways, potentially leading to undernutrition as well as. . . obesity.”    Food Sovereignty  "Food Sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems."    Open Source Data    A legal protection that ensures that data that is owned and available for use to everyone in a particular community. In the case of Open Food Network, all users have access to all code associated with the platform but must make any alterations or new code available to all other users.    Platform   Digital infrastructure or frameworks for different kinds of exchange. For example, Open Food Network is a platform that enables digital food hubs, shops, or farmers markets.   Producer   A food enterprise which makes, grows, bakes, cooks, or produces food which it can supply to other businesses for sale.      Robotics  The use of machines to perform tasks previously completed by waged workers. In agriculture, robotics include picking and milking machines, tractors and other farming machines, and packing machines, among other technologies.   Supply Chain  All of the components of a system—including organizations, producers, suppliers, people, resources, activities, information, and infrastructures—that get a product to a consumer.    Sustainable Food System  Food systems that are “socially just, support local economies; are ecologically regenerative, and foster citizen engagement.”      Discussion Questions  How are digital technologies changing food and farming How are privacy concerns around food and farming data similar to, or different from, more general digital privacy worries (e.g., social media, geo-tracking, etc.)? Why is concentrated power in digital food and farming an issue of social justice? What are some approaches that can ensure digital technologies equitably serve farmers and others who work in food? 

The founding fathers of the social sciences recognized commensality as a major issue but considered it mostly in a religious, sacrificial, ritualistic context. ...

The high resource intensity of industrial beef in high-income economies has prompted growing interest in alternative, potentially lower environment...

Tara Garnett is a researcher at the University of Oxford where she runs the Food Climate Research Network and its sister site Foodsource.  Her work centres on the interactions among food, climate, health and broader sustainability issues.  She has particular interests in livestock as an area where many of these converge, and in how knowledge is communicated to and interpreted by policy makers, civil society and industry, and in their different approaches to food problems and solutions. Tara is also part of the LEAP project at Oxford, a Wellcome Trust-funded initiative focused on gaining a greater understanding of the health, environmental, social and economic effects of livestock production and consumption.  In particular she works closely with Jamie Lorimer, Alex Sexton and Nathan Clay, on themes which explore the rise in alternatives to animal products, and transitions in the dairy sector. You can contact Tara on taragarnett@fcrn.org.uk.

Some efforts to preserve or rewild natural habitats are shifting harmful land use to other parts of the world – and this could drive an even steeper decline in the planet’s species, according to a

Considering the contemporary global landscape of interlocking environmental, economic and political challenges - labelled as a polycrisis - the paper takes issue with an influential narrative of technological solutionism. Both within the rapidly digitalizing agricultural sector that is reshaping industrial farming and across the novel foods category engaged in scaling protein production, there is a tendency to proclaim new technologies as providing singular remedies to existential problems.  While conceding that new technologies may have an important role to play as we navigate uncertainty in striving for healthy, sustainable diets, this commentary argues that such efforts ought to be informed by a wider vision embracing complexity and scientific humility and capable of scrutinising the purpose of such innovations while ensuring the inclusion of valued social and cultural attributes of food. Ultimately, challenging dominant narratives of technological solutionism requires civil society to develop alternative discourses that speak to human and ecological wellbeing above purely technocratically defined objectives.

Massive political efforts are needed to tackle the root causes of hunger – conflict, poverty, inequality. Technology alone is not sufficient.

The Food Museum and EA Sustain present a special series of talks in conjunction with our ‘Forty Farms’ exhibition, discussing the sustainability of our food industry with experts, writers, photographers, producers and more.

New research finds meat production methods which are better for animals aren't always better for the planet, and vice-versa. How can we balance the trade-offs?

Nature Microbiology - AMR, One Health and the environment

The use of antibiotics in raising livestock is complex. We could be moving towards a less-than-ideal result due to poor understanding, over-simplistic messaging and a rush for competitive advantage.

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Pharming animals: a global history of antibiotics in food production (1935–2017)

The biophilia hypothesis has been influential in explaining humans' attraction to nature. Here, we critically evaluate recent research on biophilia, focusing on automatic and instinct-like responses to nature. We explore how biophilia-based interventions may contribute to inequality and propose cultural evolution as a parsimonious alternative to biophilia.

Dartmoor’s iconic landscape, with its expansive moors, granite tors, and biodiverse peatlands, is more than just visually stunning—it is an important upland ecosystem that supports an array of habitats that play an essential role in carbon sequestration. Among these unique areas is the Swincombe valley in the heart of Dartmoor, which has long been a

Mental health problems induced, in part, by climate change are becoming increasingly common as the world warms

Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.

Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh, India, is a key cotton‐growing area in one of the most closely watched arenas of the global struggle over genetically modified crops. In 2005 farmers adopted India’s first genetically modified crop, Bt cotton, in numbers that resemble a fad. Various parties, including the biotechnology firm behind the new technology, interpret the spread as the result of farmer experimentation and management skill, alluding to orthodox innovation‐diffusion theory. However, a multiyear ethnography of Warangal cotton farmers shows a striking pattern of localized, ephemeral cotton seed fads preceding the spread of the genetically modified seeds. The Bt cotton fad is symptomatic of systematic disruption of the process of experimentation and development of management skill. In fact, Warangal cotton farming offers a case study in agricultural deskilling, a process that differs in fundamental ways from the better‐known process of industrial deskilling. In terms of cultural evolutionary theory, deskilling severs a vital link between environmental and social learning, leaving social learning to propagate practices with little or no environmental basis. However, crop genetic modification is not inherently deskilling and, ironically, has played a role in reinvolving farmers in Gujarat in the process of breeding.

Scholars have proposed agroecology as a promising method for promoting sustainable and socially just agricultural production systems. However, the extent to which agroecological practices will generate the yields required to ensure sufficient food globally remains unclear. This notion is particularly true in the context of Africa, where agricultural productivity is low but levels of hunger and malnutrition are high. To address this knowledge gap, this article undertakes a systematic review of empirical studies to assess the overall status of agroecology-related research in Africa. Using descriptive and meta-analytical methods, we evaluate empirical evidence on the effect of agroecological practices on land and labour productivity. Our analysis of 501 peer-reviewed articles reveals that the body of agroecology-related literature in Africa has been growing in the past 10 years from approximately 10 to more than 70 studies per annum before and after 2014, respectively, with a strong focus on East Africa, particularly Kenya. The majority of the reviewed studies relate to but do not mention agroecology in the title or abstract. Thus, solely relying on studies that use the term may introduce bias and overlook valuable research contributions to the field. The meta-analysis could identify 39 agronomic studies with 392 observations in which agroecological practices were compared to monocrop systems (defined as plots where similar plants grow alongside each other simultaneously and sequentially from one season to the next) with or without inputs as the control groups. The meta-analysis indicates that agroecological practices are associated with a positive and significant difference in land productivity, compared to that for monocrop systems especially so when monocrops are grown without inputs. However, the size and direction of yield differs by practice, crop, climatic factor, soil property and type of control.

This book provides a systems perspective and understanding to comprehensively address the complexities of agroecological systems and their transitions.