The Future of Food

On the floodplains between the Tagus and Sorraia rivers, just outside Lisbon, lies one of Portugal’s most remarkable agricultural landscapes, Companhia das Lezírias. In this episode of The Science Behind your Salad, Jane Craigie steps into a living, breathing system where cork oak forests, rice paddies, grazing cattle, and vineyards coexist, shaped by centuries of stewardship and increasingly by the demands of a changing climate. From the kitchen of estate chef Pedro Samora - where local ingredients tell stories of heritage and community - to the rice fields that define Portugal’s deep cultural connection to food, this is a journey through a place where agriculture is both tradition and innovation. Meeting the people behind the landscape, one of the estate managers, Rui Veríssimo Batista to rice specialist João Alegria, CropLife Portugal’s João Cardoso, and BASF’s Pedro Reis, Jane explores how this vast estate is adapting. Digital tools, precision farming, and biodiversity-led practices are helping to balance productivity with environmental responsibility in a hotter, drier future. Portugal consumes more rice per person than anywhere else in Europe, and here, that story unfolds not just in fields, but on plates, in communities, and across generations. This episode is a sensory exploration of food, farming, and place, where past and future meet, and where agriculture works in rhythm with land, water, and nature. A story of balance. A story of resilience. And a reminder that the food on our plate begins long before the kitchen. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before sunrise in central Kenya, green beans are packed for European supermarkets while, on the same morning, women carry leafy greens to sell by the roadside. In this episode, Jane Craigie explores Kenya’s dual food systems — one feeding global markets with precision and scale, the other sustaining families through informal trade and smallholder farming. From women-led coffee cooperatives and honey producers in Baringo County to vast flower farms exporting hundreds of tons daily, we examine how agriculture underpins Kenya’s economy and livelihoods. As exports grow and sustainability pressures mount, the question emerges: how can Kenya continue to feed the world while ensuring it feeds itself? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this special episode of The Science Behind Your Salad, we take you inside the World Food Prize and the Borlaug Dialogue, the gathering inspired by the grandfather of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug’s and his inherent belief that hunger is a challenge humanity can solve. Recorded in Iowa, the episode brings together voices shaping the future of food. Jeannie Borlaug Laube reflects on her father’s legacy from his childhood farm. Rattan Lal reminds us why healthy soils still anchor global food security, while Cary Fowler offers the long view on safeguarding crop diversity. Paul Temple grounds the discussion in farm-level realities, and Olivia Marti brings the energy of a new generation. With insights from Neil Bentley on innovation in a climate-stressed world, this episode closes with a simple truth: feeding the future will take science, leadership, and hope. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Social media has given farmers the perfect way to share the many joys, challenges and the daily realities of farming with people interested in how their food is produced. A growing number of influencers have gained millions of followers who welcome their regular and honest posts and the insights the content gives into their lives. Many say that they started sharing their stories to play a part in developing society’s interest in food production, land management and in appreciating the trade-offs that are a daily part of profitable and compliant agriculture. In this episode of the Science Behind your Salad we are celebrating some of these farmers who came together to connect and inspire one another at an AgXplorers’ Influencer Camp in Germany. Host Jane Craigie caught up with five of the 20 influencers at the event - Marie Hoffman, from Germany, Ally Hunter Blair who farms with his family in England’s Wye Valley, Tonis Soopalu, Estonia’s only farming influencer, Lasma Lapina from Latvia, and Austrian farmer, DJ and restaurateur, Johannes Burchhart, who describes farming as “like a heartbeat”. Jane also spoke to Thomas Fischer who farms very sustainably at Quellendorf near Berlin, one of the farm’s ecologist partners, Christian Schmidt Egger and BASF’s Anna Lena Hottendorf. Handles for the influencers: Ally Hunter Blair @wyefarm Johannes Burchhart @bauernjohny Marie Hoffman @marie_hfmn97 Lasma Lapina @lapainaa Tonis Soopalu @farmer.tonis See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Feeding humanity in the future brings a complex set of interconnected challenges. What’s abundantly clear is that, over the coming decades, farming isn’t just about producing more, it’s about doing it differently, with the environment and society’s needs central to the task in hand. In this episode of the Science Behind Your Salad, Jane Craigie explores feeding the future, evolving and adapting to climate change and its mitigation, and innovating, just as agriculture has done for centuries. For Jack Bobo, UCLA’s Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, and seasoned keynote speaker, it’s important not to forget what has been achieved thanks to agricultural advances. To put this into context, he says that if we were farming today with 1960s technology, we would require one billion additional hectares. What we consider as ‘the future’ centres around the year 2050 and feeding 1.5 billion more people with an estimated 50% more food and 70% more protein, this is a very stretching goal, yet farmers are ready to take on the challenge. For Thomas and Jana Gäbert, their cooperative farm in Trebbin near Berlin in Germany, seems to encompass what the farm of the future should be – serving the community, running circular and self-sufficient approaches and with the aim to sourcing as much as possible locally including their energy, workforce and services. As farmer Richard Hinchliffe, from Yorkshire in the UK accepts, the challenges are ever changing, but there is always a solution, as he describes in his battle against blackgrass, a common weed in cereal farming. His understanding of the weed’s behaviour, and how to break the cycle of seed return, has helped him control an increasingly difficult foe. BASF’s Michael Hoelter works closely with farmers like Richard, to research how resistance to herbicides builds in weed populations, and the best solutions to control grassweeds like blackgrass. The partnership between farmer and researchers like Michael and crucial for farmers to feed the future. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.