This week in Fodder we’re featuring a constructive and uplifting interview with two researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Petra Berkhout and Jeanne Nel. They are the authors of this year’s Mansholt report which explores the future of food and land use in the EU, constructed around five key food system dilemmas. 

TABLE interviews Tom Heap about his new book Land Smart in which he explores many difficult tensions and trade-offs in land use, from biofuels versus solar panels and regenerative farming to biotechnology, and tiptoes into the emotionally-laden debate of dietary change – revealing his penchant for pragmatism. 

This article explores the land-use competition of biofuel production, solar farms on agricultural land and food security. It argues that solar farms produce multitudes more energy than biofuels while allowing for crop production underneath, easing the land-use trade-off between food production, energy production and farm income. 

TV and radio presenter Tom Heap explores the various and often conflicting uses of land in the UK. Through interviews and encounters with farmers, scientists, conservationists and labourers, Heap looks at demands on land including food, renewable energy, carbon storage and housing. 

This report by the Green Alliance explores potential uses for land that is assumed to become available as diets shift to more plant based sources of protein. It focuses on the potential of alternative proteins from plant based foods, precision fermentation and cultivated meat to reduce the demand on land which is increasingly facing pressure from other needs. It seeks to contribute to policy recommendations on future land use.

Smallholder farmers, pastoralists and indigenous people face unprecedented threats to their land, according to a new report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES FOOD). The report explores the different drivers of land grabbing such as the fight for water and actors such as carbon off-setters and reveals that 1% of farms account for 70% of global farmland.

This ethnography by David E. Gilbert details the struggle of a group of Indonesian agricultural workers to reclaim their land from a nearby plantation to rebuild and restore the environment and their livelihoods.

This study investigates the relational values which connect people to ecosystems and economic and environmental factors which drive adoption of regenerative agriculture by farmers and ranchers in the United States. Through an analysis of thirty-one semi-structured interviews from self-identified regenerative agriculturalists, the authors find the most salient relational values and economic and environmental factors associated with participants' adoption of regenerative agricultural practices. They highlight the value of incorporating a theoretical lens which emphasises the relationships between humans and the environment to economic and environmental investigations and find a shared belief that finding a balance between economics and a vision of regenerative agriculture is a real possibility for participants of this study.

This paper adds to the literature on modelling agricultural land-use demand in 2050 given a growing global population, climate change-induced changes in yields, and projections for as-yet unrealised technological improvements. The main innovation of this study is to constrain the amount of dietary change that can be included in the model. Consequently, this model includes much more regional dietary variation than do other such projections, and much higher ASF consumption than many. The authors find that, contrary to previous studies, several regions cannot achieve food security without expanding agricultural land use. In particular, more pasture land is needed, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In a wider group of regions, producing sufficient food without increasing agricultural land use only appears possible if we assume an optimistic scenario for increasing yields