Articles

A ‘foodshed’ model indicates the minimum distance between crop production and consumption globally. Results show that most of the world’s population depends on trade to feed themselves, even under different levels of yield gap closure and food loss reduction.

African swine fever (ASF) is diminishing pork production in East Asia, especially China, but the global economic costs of ASF are unclear. Mason-D’Croz et al. model the effect of Chinese ASF outbreak scenarios on the global pork market, predicting pork, beef and poultry price increases and a decline in per capita calorie intake in China.

Animal skeletal muscle cell culture has the potential to provide new protein sources without the need for conventional animal agriculture. Ben-Ayre et. al. address one of the challenges of growing cell-based meat in vitro by using textured soy protein as an extracellular matrix scaffold. This approach allowed three-dimensional skeletal muscle cell development to produce a meat-like product for human consumption.

Policy packages for reducing the environmental impact of food systems were tested for acceptability through conjoint experiments in China, Germany and the United States. Achieving a sustainable food system may involve unpopular measures, but strategic policy bundling may increase citizen support for these measures.

Perennial crops such as fruits and nuts, important to dietary diversity and nutrition, represent almost 40% of California’s agriculture by economic value. Here, the impacts of climate change and ozone on historical and future yields of perennial crops in California are assessed.

Transgenic rice engineered to increase photosynthetic activity through overproduction of ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase–oxygenase (Rubisco) shows increased rice yields, with improved nitrogen-use efficiency, in an experimental paddy field.

Understanding the response of agriculture to heat and moisture stress is essential to adapt food systems under climate change. Using newly available satellite soil moisture data, this study finds that the combined influence of soil moisture and atmospheric evaporative demand is important for accurately predicting US maize yields.

Poultry coccidiosis results in about US$3 billion global production losses per year, and is managed by prophylactic antimicrobial use. Lessard et al. have developed chicken feed based on transgenic corn for mitigating coccidiosis, resulting in reduced intestinal lesions and improved body weight and feed conversion in Eimeria-infected corn-fed animals compared to untreated controls. Corn-fed and salinomycin-treated birds had comparable outcomes, indicating potential for antimicrobial-free management of coccidiosis.

Food systems are increasingly globalized and interdependent. Using food supply data from over 170 countries, Bentham et al. characterize global patterns of food supply change over five decades, highlighting the decline in the supply of animal source food and sugar in many Western countries, the increase in the supply of such foods in Asian countries and remarkably little change in food supply in the sub-Saharan Africa region.

Thlaspi arvense (pennycress) has the potential to provide new sources of food and bioproducts when grown as a winter cover crop. Here, Chopra et al. demonstrate that multiple desirable traits can be stacked to rapidly domesticate pennycress. The resulting crop integrates into current crop rotations and produces seeds with improved nutritional qualities, easier harvesting and suitability for human consumption.

Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will impact agricultural land use and its economic value in Great Britain. Ritchie et al. model the impacts of smooth (conventional climate change) and abrupt (tipping point change) AMOC collapse on land use, arable farming and related economic outputs in Britain, as well as the economic feasibility of technological adaptations such as widespread irrigation.

Global gridded crop models simulate the impact of climate change on crop yield, but uncertainty is difficult to quantify, which reduces their reliability. Xiong et al. explored how parameterization strategies can reduce uncertainty and identified greater uncertainty in future wheat yields grown at mid-to-high latitudes.