Robots and fuel cells create food security on The University farm – Dr John Strak

May 24, 2011

I was given a tour of The University’s dairy unit last week – part of the University’s 400 hectare farm. Dr Stephen Ramsden, the farm’s director, showed me around and, unsurprisingly, I was shown a dairy enterprise that was at the leading edge of dairy production research. The University’s herd is usually around 200 cows …

Mixed farms and vertical farming for food security

May 13, 2011

Food and commodity prices are going through the roof but there are reasons to believe that university researchers and the agri-food industry can respond to these market signals. Once upon a time almost all farms were ‘mixed’, ie the farmer had a mix of crops and livestock, and sometimes field vegetables, as part of the …

Good news for The University of Nottingham

March 31, 2011

With direct links to Global Food Security, Dr Adam David Morton’s application for a Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) Highfield Fellow has been successful.  This means that Prof. Gerardo Otero (Simon Fraser University http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/otero/) will be hosted at the University of Nottingham from January to April 2012. Over the past two decades, Prof. Otero’s research has been at the …

Breaking the dependency

Interesting blog from Dr Sean Mayes  – We are too reliant on too few crop species. Using more underutilised plants will improve global food security. See link below: http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/index.php/2011/03/breaking-the-dependency/

Food Glorious Food

The Foresight report entitled ‘The Future of Food and Farming’ was published in February 2011. The aim of the project was to examine the pressures to be placed on the global food system over the next 40 years and determine what needs to be achieved in order to feed the world’s population, predicted to rise …