Food is also what connects farming to human health and our natural environment. In this episode of The Science Behind Your Salad, we ask you to close your eyes and listen: the steady hum of bees, the deep boom of a rare bittern, and the people creating the future of the food on your plate.

Host, Jane Craigie, visits the rice fields of Australia, where a grower and an ecologist are working side by side to create habitat for endangered birds while producing food and managing limited access to irrigation water. We hear from a nutritionist about how diets shift through our lives and circumstances, and why nutrient density matters for lifelong health. And we meet innovators transforming agriculture: one listening to bees’ wingbeats to track pollination, another developing biological controls to fight pests, and a tomato breeder working for better flavour, resilience, and shelf life.

This is farming, science, and nature - connected in so many unseen and fascinating ways.

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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

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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.

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