// Latest Posts

High commodity prices and global food security – Dr John Strak

 Food and commodity prices are in the news now – even making the front page of popular newspapers on regular occasions. Oxfam’s latest announcement on its expectations for crop prices makes for gloomy reading. And along with the news reporting there has been speculation about what the surge in commodity prices means for global food …

Nottingham leads the way in securing skills for the UK agri-food industry – Professor Jeremy Roberts

All bioscientists know that ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is a chemical that energizes living organisms and makes them work productively. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) are hoping that their new ATP (Advanced Training Partnership) programme will energize Universities and research institutes and make them work even more productively with industry.  The scheme, announced …

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

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

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

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 …