The Science Behind Your Salad

On the floodplains between the Tagus and Sorraia rivers, just outside Lisbon, lies one of Portugal’s most remarkable agricultural landscapes, Companhia das Lezírias.  In this episode of The Science Behind your Salad, Jane Craigie steps into a living, breathing system where cork oak forests, rice paddies, grazing cattle, and vineyards coexist, shaped by centuries of stewardship and increasingly by the demands of a changing climate.  From the kitchen of estate chef Pedro Samora - where local ingredients tell stories of heritage and community - to the rice fields that define Portugal’s deep cultural connection to food, this is a journey through a place where agriculture is both tradition and innovation.  Meeting the people behind the landscape, one of the estate managers, Rui Veríssimo Batista to rice specialist João Alegria, CropLife Portugal’s João Cardoso, and BASF’s Pedro Reis, Jane explores how this vast estate is adapting. Digital tools, precision farming, and biodiversity-led practices are helping to balance productivity with environmental responsibility in a hotter, drier future.  Portugal consumes more rice per person than anywhere else in Europe, and here, that story unfolds not just in fields, but on plates, in communities, and across generations.  This episode is a sensory exploration of food, farming, and place, where past and future meet, and where agriculture works in rhythm with land, water, and nature.  A story of balance. A story of resilience. And a reminder that the food on our plate begins long before the kitchen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before sunrise in central Kenya, green beans are packed for European supermarkets while, on the same morning, women carry leafy greens to sell by the roadside. In this episode, Jane Craigie explores Kenya’s dual food systems — one feeding global markets with precision and scale, the other sustaining families through informal trade and smallholder farming. From women-led coffee cooperatives and honey producers in Baringo County to vast flower farms exporting hundreds of tons daily, we examine how agriculture underpins Kenya’s economy and livelihoods. As exports grow and sustainability pressures mount, the question emerges: how can Kenya continue to feed the world while ensuring it feeds itself?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this special episode of The Science Behind Your Salad, we take you inside the World Food Prize and the Borlaug Dialogue, the gathering inspired by the grandfather of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug’s and his inherent belief that hunger is a challenge humanity can solve. Recorded in Iowa, the episode brings together voices shaping the future of food. Jeannie Borlaug Laube reflects on her father’s legacy from his childhood farm. Rattan Lal reminds us why healthy soils still anchor global food security, while Cary Fowler offers the long view on safeguarding crop diversity. Paul Temple grounds the discussion in farm-level realities, and Olivia Marti brings the energy of a new generation. With insights from Neil Bentley on innovation in a climate-stressed world, this episode closes with a simple truth: feeding the future will take science, leadership, and hope.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Food is also what connects farming to human health and our natural environment. In this episode of The Science Behind Your Salad, we ask you to close your eyes and listen: the steady hum of bees, the deep boom of a rare bittern, and the people creating the future of the food on your plate.  Host, Jane Craigie, visits the rice fields of Australia, where a grower and an ecologist are working side by side to create habitat for endangered birds while producing food and managing limited access to irrigation water. We hear from a nutritionist about how diets shift through our lives and circumstances, and why nutrient density matters for lifelong health. And we meet innovators transforming agriculture: one listening to bees’ wingbeats to track pollination, another developing biological controls to fight pests, and a carrot variety developer working for better flavour, resilience, and shelf life.  This is farming, science, and nature - connected in so many unseen and fascinating ways. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Social media has given farmers the perfect way to share the many joys, challenges and the daily realities of farming with people interested in how their food is produced.   A growing number of influencers have gained millions of followers who welcome their regular and honest posts and the insights the content gives into their lives.   Many say that they started sharing their stories to play a part in developing society’s interest in food production, land management and in appreciating the trade-offs that are a daily part of profitable and compliant agriculture.   In this episode of the Science Behind your Salad we are celebrating some of these farmers who came together to connect and inspire one another at an AgXplorers’ Influencer Camp in Germany.   Host Jane Craigie caught up with five of the 20 influencers at the event - Marie Hoffman, from Germany, Ally Hunter Blair who farms with his family in England’s Wye Valley, Tonis Soopalu, Estonia’s only farming influencer, Lasma Lapina from Latvia, and Austrian farmer, DJ and restaurateur, Johannes Burchhart, who describes farming as “like a heartbeat”.  Jane also spoke to Thomas Fischer who farms very sustainably at Quellendorf near Berlin, one of the farm’s ecologist partners, Christian Schmidt Egger and BASF’s Anna Lena Hottendorf.   Handles for the influencers:  Ally Hunter Blair @wyefarm  Johannes Burchhart @bauernjohny  Marie Hoffman @marie_hfmn97  Lasma Lapina @lapainaa  Tonis Soopalu @farmer.tonis See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Feeding humanity in the future brings a complex set of interconnected challenges. What’s abundantly clear is that, over the coming decades, farming isn’t just about producing more, it’s about doing it differently, with the environment and society’s needs central to the task in hand.   In this episode of the Science Behind Your Salad, Jane Craigie explores feeding the future, evolving and adapting to climate change and its mitigation, and innovating, just as agriculture has done for centuries.   For Jack Bobo, UCLA’s Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, and seasoned keynote speaker, it’s important not to forget what has been achieved thanks to agricultural advances. To put this into context, he says that if we were farming today with 1960s technology, we would require one billion additional hectares.   What we consider as ‘the future’ centres around the year 2050 and feeding 1.5 billion more people with an estimated 50% more food and 70% more protein, this is a very stretching goal, yet farmers are ready to take on the challenge.  For Thomas and Jana Gäbert, their cooperative farm in Trebbin near Berlin in Germany, seems to encompass what the farm of the future should be – serving the community, running circular and self-sufficient approaches and with the aim to sourcing as much as possible locally including their energy, workforce and services.   As farmer Richard Hinchliffe, from Yorkshire in the UK accepts, the challenges are ever changing, but there is always a solution, as he describes in his battle against blackgrass, a common weed in cereal farming. His understanding of the weed’s behaviour, and how to break the cycle of seed return, has helped him control an increasingly difficult foe.   BASF’s Michael Hoelter works closely with farmers like Richard, to research how resistance to herbicides builds in weed populations, and the best solutions to control grassweeds like blackgrass. The partnership between farmer and researchers like Michael and crucial for farmers to feed the future.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode of The Science Behind Your Salad from BASF visits Spain, Portugal and Egypt in a quest to discover how olive crops will be affected by climate change. Jane Craigie meets the farmers busily harvesting their crops, ready to take them off to the mill to be pressed into delicious golden olive oil. The main focus of the olive growing industry encircles the Mediterranean. Olives favour warm conditions, but in some areas the climate is warming. Arid regions of Andalusia are becoming drier, and so farmers rely more and more on irrigation. Jane meets farmers working hard to ensure their water goes a long way and they get the best from the scarce supply. She also meets farmers reinvigorating the olive industry in Egypt, with the help of modern farming methods and crop treatments, plus in Portugal she learns how the circularity of the farming operation, ensuring nothing is wasted, is becoming normal practice. Meanwhile she talks to Johnny Madge, internationally known olive oil expert to find out what the future holds for a crop that faces challenges from a volatile climate.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our volatile climate will impact the way we cook and the way we eat. And so, farming needs to adapt, eating needs to adapt, and how we cook, will also need to adapt. In this episode of the Science Behind Your Salad, Jane Craigie explores the world of carbon farming: how can we grow better? How can we eat better? How can we feed ourselves with the climate in mind? For chef and best-selling author Alejandra Schrader, that’s simple! A little more thought and a little more planning can enable us to eat delicious, healthy food that has delivers all the required nutrients we need, and reduces our impact on the planet. As BASF’s Marko Grozdanovic states, agriculture is responsible for 17% of greenhouse gas emissions, and so this episode explores ways to dramatically reduce this figure. Jane attended the Carbon Exchange event in Paris to find out more: Andy Beadle is a soil scientist who studies the way carbon can be locked up in the soil to maintain soil health, cut emissions and improve biodiversity; Robert Racz works on the Better Pork project that looks at ways to cut emissions in the pig industry, not just at source, but at all levels of the supply chain, with all links in the industry playing their part ; Thierry Laval runs the FoodPilot initiative that relies on data to focus on the problem. Data is vital to crack the challenges farmers face and with everyone working together to move the industry in the right direction there is plenty of optimism that farming can play it’s role in providing us all the food we need to be able to cook delicious and healthy food for the future whilst also ensuring what we eat is sustainable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Whether we’re buying a punnet of fruit, a freshly made burrito or a can of tomatoes, we take it for granted that the food is safe and free of any biological or chemical contamination. There are a host of food laws, regulatory bodies and food inspection schemes, as well as guidance on food preparation in our homes, to make sure that our food is safe. In this episode of the Science Behind your Salad, Jane meets Professor Louise Manning, a food system and safety researcher, Eric Kimunguyi, from AAK Grow in Kenya and Andrew Stirling, a potato farmer and processor from Angus in Scotland to understand the different aspects of food safety around the globe.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There is a huge variety of grains, from quinoa to spelt, from bulgur wheat to pearl barley, from barley to rye. Barley used to feed livestock and used in whisky distilling are found right on Jane Craigie’s doorstep in Aberdeenshire. In this episode of the Science Behind Your Salad, Jane meets the growers and distillers as they strive to produce the crop sustainably. She meets Graeme Cruikshank from the award winning Aberlour distillery, Nicola Wordie who has supplied the distillery with barley in the past, Andrew Booth who farms sustainably with a large Anaerobic Digester on his farm and we also hear from Horta, a subsidiary of BASF, striving to improve yields in a part of the world where barley for beer is vital.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.