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Achieving yield gains requires more insights into the deterministic pathways of crop yields. This Perspective proposes a wiring diagram as a platform to integrate knowledge of the interrelationships of physiological traits impacting wheat yield potentials and their interactions with the crop developmental stages that can be used to accelerate genetic gains through breeding.
Improving manure management can reduce nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, but its impacts on indirect N2O emissions and other greenhouse gases need to be assessed. Structural changes that address livestock demands and spatial planning are needed.
Food price data at the retail level are critical to assessing the impacts of covariate shocks on people’s access to healthy, nutritious diets. Through the calculation of cost and affordability, retail food prices can also help identify entry points to improve food and nutrition security, such as in the context of COVID-19.
Degrowth can aid climate mitigation in the food system by integrating reduced animal protein demand, emissions pricing and wealth redistribution into a global food systems transformation.
Modelling the quantitative effects of sustainable degrowth and efficiency proposals on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, material output and economic activity shows that a combination of both can lead to a sustainable transformation of the food system.
A farmer’s decision whether to use fertilizer is complicated in rainfed areas because the resulting yield gains vary greatly depending on rainfall, temperatures, soil conditions and many other factors. Farmers on about 25% of sub-Saharan Africa’s rainfed maize-growing land face an unacceptably high likelihood that this productivity-enhancing input will not pay off.
Substituting animal-source foods with novel and future foods in our daily diets is essential to mitigate global environmental change. An integrated statistical approach and optimization model support a shift to alternative, more sustainable diets.
Tillage intensity is increasing across the US corn–soybean cropping systems due to increased weed resistance. The more intensive tillage regimes are likely to have negative impacts on greenhouse gas emissions from soils.
Technologies from synthetic biology can be applied to traditional practices in winemaking. Possibilities beyond natural microbial communities exist to improve predictive capabilities for the winemaker vintage to vintage, and introduce new characteristics to wine.
An analysis of historical Escherichia coli samples from livestock reveals how antimicrobial resistance can spread — and how understanding the biology underlying its spread can inform effective policy actions.
Trade-offs between land-based climate change mitigation efforts and food security are common to most decarbonization scenarios. Accounting for climate impacts and inclusive policy design can reverse this trend.
Chemical and pathogenic hazards in aquaculture supply chains threaten the provision of safe aquatic food. The Seafood Risk Tool is an integrated, semi-quantitative system that develops bespoke supply chain and risk management strategies.
Relocating livestock closer to croplands could increase opportunities for manure recycling and reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer — facilitating nitrogen pollution abatement and reducing the impacts of nitrogen pollution on human health.
Systems used to categorize processed foods display variation in the impact of highly processed food on risk factors for non-communicable disease. Clarity is needed on the contribution of nutrients, additives and sensory properties of foods categorized as highly processed to health and disease.
Animal-derived serum use in culture media is a financial, ethical and sustainability challenge for scaling up cultured meat production. Now, an omics approach has identified key cellular signals that allow myocytes to develop in the absence of animal serum.
Feeding animals with low-opportunity-cost biomass — a principle of circular agriculture — may upgrade the role of cattle and pigs in sustainable and healthy food systems, as represented by the EAT–Lancet dietary recommendations.
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.
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.
