The Institute for Sustainable Food (University of Sheffield)

The Institute for Sustainable Food, at the University of Sheffield, finds dynamic solutions to the challenges of food security and sustainability. Research conducted within the institute brings together researchers from multiple disciplines to understand and transform whole-system food production from field to fork.

Aim

To address the challenges of food security and sustainability

Short background information

Launched in 2019, the Institute for Sustainable Food is flagship institute at the University of Sheffield, which draws on research from more than 100 leading researchers in the fields of science, engineering, social sciences, and arts and humanities. The Institute for Sustainable Food encompasses three research pillars to address the whole food system: plant production and protection; translational and transformative research, and food consumption, health and sustainability.

Funding

University of Sheffield, European and National funding sources

Activities

• Regenerative agriculture and soil health
• Land use policy and practice
• Improving biodiversity on agricultural land
• Protecting crop plants against pests and diseases
• Carbon sequestration potential of agricultural soils
• Better nitrogen use efficiency in crops, to reduce fertilizer inputs on field
• Increasing food production in urban areas
• Remote sensing

The Institute for Sustainable Food seeks to discover new ways to understand the complexity within the food production system ‘from farm to fork’, addressing the agri-food system as a whole and not just in terms of its separate parts. Thus, integrating across the domains of production and consumption and embedding the needs of individual stakeholders from consumers and farmers to the wider business community, NGOs and government.

Our approach recognises that achieving a sustainable food future is as much a socio-cultural problem as it is technological, understanding the global nature of the food system while appreciating its impacts can be both local and global in scale. By placing the health of our environment, the healthiness of our food and the health of the global population at the core of our mission to help make agri-food systems more sustainable, we are developing the innovations that will allow us to live within the limits imposed by the resources available in the natural world.

Research at the Institute for Sustainable Food also makes use of state-of-the-art research infrastructure. This includes the following facilities:

The Sir David Read Controlled Environment Facility is a world-leading climate-controlled plant growth facility, containing 64 precision Conviron controlled climate growth chambers. The individual units are independently able to simulate the majority of terrestrial environments from tropical to polar regions as well past and future global atmospheric environments including elevated and sub-ambient CO2. These revolutionary facilities provide the basis for Sheffield’s important contributions to world food security research. Opened in 2004, the Sir David Read Controlled Environment Facility is the culmination of a £10.4 million investment by the Joint Infrastructure Fund, with a further infrastructure investment of £3.6 million in 2016-17.

The Wolfson Centre for Disease Phenomics contains state-of-the-art, high-throughput scanners (chlorophyll fluorescence, multispectral and thermal). The instruments make it possible to image plant structure and function, and in combination with metabolomics and genomics, to study plant and pathogen biochemistry and genetics.

The Biological Mass Spectrometry Facility (BiOMICS) is a specialised service using mass spectrometry to accelerate protein and metabolite research. The biOMICS Facility provides a full infrastructure for the analysis of simple and complex mixtures of protein, peptides and metabolites, including their identification, characterisation and quantification.

The Arthur Willis Environment Centre comprises approximately 450m2 of controlled environment greenhouse space and experimental gardens. Individual chambers can be used to simulate plant growth conditions for different regions around the globe. It also contains dedicated laboratory, office and meeting room space to enable researchers to investigate the wide variety of environmental challenges facing the planet.