Articles in 2021

Building productive relationships between farmers and scientists is critical to developing new innovation pathways to solve the challenges of contemporary agriculture. On-farm experimentation (OFE) is an effective approach that brings agricultural stakeholders to support farmers’ own management decisions for agricultural innovation, with digitalization playing a key role in motivating and enabling OFE.

High-resolution satellite observations provide an accurate and cost-effective solution to monitoring national and global progress towards Sustainable Development Goals. With a new global cropland dataset, this study reports that during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the global cropland area increased by 9%, whereas the per-capita cropland area decreased by 10% and the per-capita annual cropland net primary production increased by 3.5%.

An anticipatory life-cycle assessment of industrial-scale ovalbumin production using Trichoderma reesei culture indicates that this cellular agriculture approach could have lower global warming potential than ovalbumin purified from egg whites.

Social disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered highly varied changes in diet and lifestyle. It has offered a unique opportunity to study drivers of behaviour change in the general population, building the crucial evidence base needed to tackle major challenges for transforming food systems.

The ‘toxic cocktail’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate and conflict has slowed progress on nutrition. Where long-standing budgets for nutrition have been constrained in these times, broad stakeholder engagement and non-traditional approaches to nutrition financing are needed.

The merging of small farms into fewer large ones is a key part of China’s food security and rural revitalization strategy. Yet, the benefits of implementing large-scale farms vary under different land consolidation pathways.

Armed conflicts have devastating humanitarian consequences, both direct and indirect. A crucial yet overlooked outcome is the disruption of local agricultural production and the consequent erosion of food security in war-ridden regions.

Start-ups are now the predominant source of innovation in all categories of food technology. Venture capital can accelerate innovation by enabling start-ups to pursue niche areas, iterate more rapidly and take more risks than larger companies, writes Samir Kaul.

Conflicts pose a serious threat to food security. Using remote sensing, this study reveals the location and extent of war-related cropland abandonment and its impact on food insecurity in South Sudan from 2016 to 2018—and offers a basis for timely aid provision.

The consolidation of small farms into large-scale agricultural enterprises may have important socioeconomic and environmental consequences. Based on 40,000 rural surveys, ecological modelling and geostatistical analysis, this study assesses the spatial feasibility and cost-effectiveness of land consolidation in China, and its impact on a set of sustainability indicators.

An anticipatory life cycle assessment of ovalbumin produced using cellular agriculture demonstrates sustainability gains with limited trade-offs, particularly when produced using low-carbon energy sources.

Unfed bivalve mariculture could fill the gap in demand for nutritious and sustainable seafood. This Review explores the bivalve value chain, examining how improved production practices and food processing could address consumer requirements for increased food safety and greater availability of appealing bivalve food products.

Population growth and dietary changes affect ammonia emissions from agriculture and the concentration of particulate matter in the atmosphere. This study quantifies the adverse health impacts associated with these processes in China using a mechanistic model of particulate matter formation and transport. It also compares them with direct health impacts of changing diets upon premature death from food-related diseases.

Big data collected through apps can facilitate large-scale study of diet and lifestyles. Information from the ZOE COVID Study indicates the variety and extent of impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the diets and lifestyles of adults in the United States and the United Kingdom.

GWP* is an alternative emission metric that better represents the short-lived character of methane, but its application is not straightforward and can have a substantial impact on the design of mitigation policies in agriculture.