This post is written by Helen Breewood, Research and Communications Officer at the FCRN. She also blogs about solving global sustainability issues at The Progress Motive. You can find her on Twitter.

Dr Matt Reed is a sociologist who, before a career in researching the links between technology, farming and food, worked in the food service industry. Dr Dan Keech spent many years working in food NGOs before becoming a researcher with a particular interest in cultural change around food. Prof Damian Maye is a rural geographer with a keen interest in agri-food studies, increasingly focused on questions about meat, and he has fond memories of working at a supermarket deli counter as a student. All three are part of the Countryside and Community Research Institute at The University of Gloucestershire.

In this blog post Tara Garnett, the FCRN’s director, introduces Table, a new collaboration between the University of Oxford, Wageningen University and Research and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, which will launch later this year, and which builds on and ultimately replaces the FCRN. We are in the process of recruiting a strategic coordinator and fundraising director to help take our collaboration forward, so please read on…

Ellen Fletcher holds a BSc and MSc from Imperial College London, Centre for Environmental Policy. Her research has previously focused on urban agriculture (UA) where she has provided evidence on the importance of allotments as a form of UA in sustainable cities. Ellen is currently a research assistant at Rothamsted Research, where she is part of an EU Horizon 2020 project working with farmers in the South West. Ellen would like to pay particular thanks to Catherine Broomfield for initially introducing her to the topic of global and local food systems in her seminar “Livestock farmers: prophets or pariahs?”. Catherine’s extensive body of work on UK livestock systems can be found here.

This blog post looks at publicly available data on the UK’s imports of soy and its use for feed and food. It also considers the limitations of these data and the links between different uses of soy and land use change in South America.

Leah Garcés is the president of international non-profit animal advocacy organisation Mercy For Animals and author of Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry.

Martin Rowe is the co-founder and publisher at Lantern Books. For the last three years, he has followed the development of a new generation of plant-based meat and dairy analogues, as well as that of cultured or “clean” meat. Drawing on research encapsulated in his paper, Beyond the Impossible: The Future of Plant-based and Cellular Meat and Dairy, which he wrote for Brighter Green and the Vegan America Project, Rowe notes some of the challenges accompanying these developments in the food, environmental, and technological spaces.

Hibba Mazhary is a part-time PhD student in Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. She divides her time between her thesis, teaching undergraduates, and undertaking various part-time research assistant roles, including one most recently at the RSPCA on laboratory rat welfare. Hibba is interested in all things farm animal welfare and food sustainability.

Susann Schade is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences at the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany, where she previously studied agriculture and area studies. Susann focused on life cycle assessment for her master’s thesis in which she compared the environmental impacts of different fruits and vegetables. She subsequently joined the cluster project “NovAL (Novel microalgae species as a sustainable source of bioactive nutrients in human nutrition)” of four German universities to investigate the environmental impacts of microalgae cultivation.