Interview with Professor Erik Mathijs

In this edition of the Food Systems Podcast, Alex Turk talks to Professor Erik Mathijs, Professor of the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering at KU Leuven and coordinator of the EU-funded SoilValues project. The discussion explores how healthy soils create value for farmers, businesses and wider society, supporting food production, biodiversity, water management and climate resilience. Drawing on the project’s findings, Erik explains how soil health business models can help share the costs, risks and benefits of improving soils more fairly. He highlights the importance of long-term financial support, independent advice and trusted partnerships in making the transition practical and economically viable for farmers.

As the Forum for the Future of Agriculture moves towards its 20th anniversary, the latest Food Systems Podcast provides an opportunity to reflect on how both the Forum and the wider food and agriculture landscape have changed - and what needs to happen next. Mark Titterington is joined by long-serving Forum Chairman Janez Potočnik for a wide-ranging conversation about the challenges facing agriculture, food systems, Europe and the international community. Their discussion considers how the Forum itself should evolve, while exploring some of the bigger forces shaping its agenda: geopolitical uncertainty, climate change, the growing importance of food and water security, financing the transition, natural-resource constraints and the need for greater resilience.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to NABU President Jörg-Andreas Krüger. During the conversation he stresses the need for cross-sector collaboration to tackle food security, climate change and biodiversity loss, pointing to war-driven food price rises as proof of rising urgency. He calls for minimum budgets for environmental and climate action over direct payments. Despite public attention shifting elsewhere, he cites NABU's growing membership as a sign support remains, and voices cautious optimism that Europe's emerging nature credits framework can avoid the mistakes made with carbon markets.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Michael Brückner, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, Munich Re Investment Partners GmbH. Michael sees nature-positive investing as still early-stage but existential for his parent company, which depends on pricing climate and nature risk correctly. He argues nature-positive actions must be properly priced - not treated as pure cost - so benefits to third parties are reflected rather than left off balance sheets. The main gap, he says, isn't capital or will but consistent, shared risk standards (unlike credit ratings, sustainability ratings vary widely) and a clear, priced path for engagement.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Lauren Phillips, FAO's Director of Partnerships and UN Collaboration. Lauren reflects on her panel at the Forum’s Annual Conference about financing agricultural transition, arguing that progress requires tackling nutrition, productivity, climate and livelihoods together rather than in isolation, and expressing encouragement that climate and agriculture were discussed jointly, though she'd like to see more focus on social and nutrition outcomes. She frames climate change as an open-ended, generational crisis that intersects with conflict and resource pressures to drive hunger, and notes that declining climate finance budgets mean development funding alone won't suffice - private finance must also be de-risked to reach even the poorest smallholder farmers, who represent both high risk and high potential payoff. She closes by emphasising that building broad, durable consensus, even if slower, produces more lasting and ambitious outcomes than settling for quick fixes.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Nomindari Enkhtur, CEO of the Mongolian Nature's Legacy Foundation. They discuss her Forum Annual Conference talk on climate resilience, explaining that despite Mongolia's unique context, it faces the same core climate, environmental degradation and biodiversity challenges as elsewhere. Nomindari highlights the country's blended public-private financing model as one relevant solution. She describes the severe threat to Mongolia's nomadic communities, who face livestock loss and forced migration to cities as the country warms at twice the global average, and closes by invoking the Mongolian concept of the "eternal blue sky" as a call for greater collaboration in the face of shared dependence on nature.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Global Ambassador for the Club of Rome. Sandrine reflects on her Annual Conference panel on the converging food and energy crises, arguing food policy must centre citizens' lived experience - who consistently want affordable, nutritious, green food and greater localisation of production. She calls for protecting vulnerable farmers and citizens through windfall taxes on oil and gas profits, cutting fossil fuel subsidies, and direct financial support.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Ethan Soloviev of HowGood. Ethan argues AI can help the agri-food system optimise holistically for climate, nature and farmer livelihoods, rather than trading them off. He's largely optimistic about AI despite concerns over energy, water use and emergent model behaviour, and sees it already speeding up decision-making on his own farm. He calls for AI trained on regenerative and agroecological data rather than industrial yield-focused data, so farmers help shape it themselves - and proposes a "moonshot" think tank using AI to build genuinely long-term plans for food and agriculture.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Martin Clough, Head of Digital Collaboration and Sustainability at Syngenta. The discussion centers on how three powerful technologies are converging: generative AI, big data, and omics science, and how they are revolutionizing agricultural innovation. He explains how historically, product design optimized one challenge at a time (efficacy, then safety, then sustainability), like solving a Rubik's Cube one side at a time. Using multi-parameter optimization now enables solving all challenges simultaneously - all six sides at once.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Harvey Locke, President, Harvey Locke Conservation Inc and Vice Chair for Nature Positive, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas. Harvey argues that environmental and economic issues are deeply connected. He challenges the traditional approach of balancing environment, economy, and society separately. Instead, Earth is the foundation - humans and the economy are subsets that must serve people, not the reverse. We need to recognize our dependence on Earth's systems and act accordingly. He ends optimistically: bringing together climate officials, investors, and conservationists in one conversation shows progress in recognizing these interconnected challenges.