Underutilized crops and their future potentials
November 2, 2022
The importance of crop diversification, for biodiversity and to cope with extreme weathers brought on by climate change, has never been more important. At the University of Nottingham, we have set up a Crop Diversification Unit, led by Dr Sean Mayes, to examine traditionally underutilized crops and their potentials as alternative sources of food for …
Future Food PhD wins prestigious Carlos Fuentes award
September 21, 2022
Karla G. Hernandez-Aguilar, a PhD candidate with the Palaeobenchmarking Resistant Agricultural Systems project, has been awarded a Carlos Fuentes award by the Mexican Society of the UK for her PhD research. Karla’s PhD project is titled: Understanding microenvironments and the potential of traditional agricultural systems in a changing climate in Mexico and Belize. Her interdisciplinary …
Improving farmer livelihoods through better cocoa bean fermentation
November 10, 2021
We can support small farmers by using science to understand cocoa bean fermentation, ensuring more consistent beans, and better incomes, write David Salt, David Gopaulchan, and Gabriel Castrillo Cocoa is a significant global commodity, generating income, export revenues, and employment for producing countries. Cocoa is grown across the equatorial belt, by some six million smallholder …
Supporting small scale farmers in developing countries
November 9, 2021
Diversifying agriculture away from limited cereal crops is important for surviving and building resilience to climate change. It also enables small scale farmers to build socio-economic flexibility, and food and nutritional security, argue Sean Mayes and Festo Massawe. Our current reliance on three major cereal crops for 60% of plant-based calories worldwide is risky. Climate …
The nutritional quality of crops and the impact of climate change
November 5, 2021
Today at COP26, discussions are focused around public empowerment and education in climate action. Galvanising public action is difficult but not impossible. Grace Kangara explains how promoting locally available organic nutrient resources to farmers is key to both improving soils and improving the nutritional quality of crops, ensuring the availability of micronutrient-dense foods at the …
Adaptation and resilience in the Yucatan: an ode to farmers – by Karla G. Hernandez-Aguilar
April 23, 2021
Karla G. Hernandez-Aguilar is a PhD student on the Palaeobenchmarking Resilient Agricultural Systems (PalaeoRAS) project I described the challenges of conducting fieldwork in the middle of a pandemic in my blog on 16 April 2021 so now I would like to take this opportunity to reflect upon the qualities of adaptation and resilience that I observed on a daily basis …
Global trading: the good, the bad and the essential
April 27, 2020
This post is written by Lucy McCarthy (QUB), Anne Touboulic (University of Nottingham), and Lee Matthews (University of Nottingham). In our last post, we began our journey considering food supply chains in times of pandemic and we touched upon their history. Here, we further consider some of the flaws in our globalised food systems and …
Understanding more about oil palm farmed by smallholders
December 12, 2019
This post is written by Dr Thomas D Alcock and Dr Christina Vimala Supramaniam During a recent trip to Malaysia, including visits to the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus, Dr Thomas D Alcock and Dr Lexi Earl stopped by some smallholder oil palm plantations to get a feel for production practices. This is what they …
Global-local knowledge systems for innovation and entrepreneurship in the developing world: An international workshop in Nottingham, 2-3 May 2019
May 29, 2019
This post was written by Dr Bin Wu and Dr Peter Noy. About 2 billion people (two thirds of the population) in the developing world live on about 500 million small farms, defined as plots of land smaller than 2 hectares. Smallholder farmers are “knowledge-rich, but economically poor” and there is a significant gap in …
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