This paper discusses the state of the art in indoor vertical farming systems (VFS) as well as future challenges in areas such as product quality, automation, sustainability and socio-economic context.

This paper by Table member Alison Caffyn studies how the proliferation of intensive poultry operations in Herefordshire and Shropshire in the UK has led to conflicts between the agri-industrial sector and local objectors. The paper draws on planning application data and interviews. Caffyn argues that local authorities and environmental agencies need to improve the regulatory regime around new intensive livestock developments.

In this book, farmer and writer James Rebanks describes how the landscape and community that his family farm is part of has changed over the past few decades as farming methods have become more intensive.

This paper, co-authored by FCRN member David Little, sets out four scenarios for the global future of aquaculture - food sovereignty, blue internationalism, aqua-nationalism and aquatic chicken - and discusses how each scenario could affect human wellbeing and environmental health.

This piece, part of the Oxford Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) programme’s Controversies series, explores the arguments and evidence around the environmental impacts of intensive feedlot systems versus extensive grazing systems.

This systematic review examines the effects of anthropogenic land use change (such as deforestation, urbanisation and agricultural intensification) on the transmission of zoonotic diseases from mammals to humans. 

This article in the Guardian explores the links between food production and COVID-19. It points out that, while the virus is likely to have been transmitted to humans via a pangolin at a “wet” market in Wuhan, China, the virus may have come to pangolins from wild bats. Some smallholder farmers, the article suggests, began to rear “wild” animals (such as pangolins) for income when their previous livestock farming was undercut economically by industrial farming methods, and may also have been pushed onto marginal land (nearer to forests, bats and the viruses hosted by bats) by industrial agriculture’s expansion.

This article in AgFunderNews explores how the “pasture-raised” label is used in poultry retail in the US. The label, which has not yet been officially defined by the USDA or the FDA, has attracted controversy from some food industry actors and animal welfare advocates, who say that some producers using the label do not have welfare standards as high as customers expect.

A joint investigation by the Guardian newspaper, Channel 4 News and the UK’s non-profit Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that halving ammonia emissions from farms in the UK could save thousands of lives each year. However, a loophole in regulations means that ammonia emissions from beef and dairy farms do not have to be monitored.