Martin Persson is an Associate Professor at Physical Resource Theory, Department of Space, Earth & Environment at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. In addition to greenhouse gas metrics, his research focuses on the role of agricultural production, trade and consumption in driving tropical deforestation, as well as policies for halting the loss of forests.

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.