The Science Behind Your Salad

^{Crossing the globe to discover how the best ingredients that end up on our tables are grown}

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Latest Episode: Feeding the Future

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. 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.

Our guest: Jack Bobo

Jack Bobo is the Executive Director of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies. Previously, he led the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham. Jack’s extensive experience spans roles as the Director of Global Food and Water Policy at The Nature Conservancy, CEO of Futurity, a food foresight company, and as a senior advisor on global food policy at the U.S. Department of State. Jack is the author of Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices, a book that unpacks how our food environment has fueled the global obesity crisis and highlights the role of behavioral science in tackling food policy challenges. Known for his expertise in global food systems, Jack has delivered over 500 keynote speeches across 50 countries, inspiring audiences on topics like food security and agricultural innovation. Jack holds a J.D., an M.S. in Environmental Science, a B.S. in Biology, and a B.A. in Psychology and Chemistry, reflecting his interdisciplinary approach to reshaping food policy and sustainability.

Our guest: Dr. Thomas and Jana Gäbert

Thomas and Jana Gäbert run an agricultural cooperative at Trebbin, 20 kilometers south of Berlin. The farm was former production cooperative within the German Democratic Republic, built during the 1970s and 80s.

The land extends to approximately 4,000 hectares of farmland, 1,150 hectares of which is grassland for the farm’s dairy herd of 950 cows plus their offspring, totalling approximately 1600 cattle, including a new enterprise of beef cattle. The cooperative also has an on-site hotel, canteen, a gas station, a car workshop and an agricultural machinery workshop.

Trebbin is one of a network of farms partnering BASF in research, on-farm trials and communicating how production agriculture can work in harmony with positive environment and biodiversity contributions for society.

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