The Biotech Podcast

Many crops currently grown in the developing world are limited by their nitrogen potential rather than their water or light potential. Difficult supply chains and high costs make using nitrogen fertilisers difficult in these regions and the use of these fertilisers brings about its own issues. Professor Giles Oldroyd aims to engineer nitrogen fixation into many crops, allowing them to utilise the abundant source of nitrogen straight from the air and therefore improve yields whilst reducing nitrogen leaching. 

As agriculture scales up it brings a host of problems. Larger tractors lead to soil compaction and lack of precision, more workers are required to ensure harvests come in on time and food waste is reduced, and corners are cut more often with increased use of herbicides and pesticides. Using autonomous vehicles can help solve many of these problems. Kit Franklin, co-creator of Hands Free Hectare and Hands Free Farm, takes us through the automation of agriculture and how we will soon get used to seeing it in our everyday lives.

A third of global food is produced by smallholder farms. High tech innovations will always make the big headlines, but if want to truly provide for the future then we must also empower those most at risk with more frugal strategies. Professor Jaideep Prabhu takes us through his views on how we can do more with less in this latest episode of the The Biotech Podcast.

In the first episode of this new season on food security we first look at what lessons we can draw from the history of agriculture and how we might expect it to change as we look into the future.Dr Helen Anne Curry is an Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge.