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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The wettest country in the world is Columbia, which receives over 3200 ml of rain annually and the driest nation, Egypt, receives just 18 ml. Agriculture uses around 70% of the world's freshwater, and irrigated farmland is crucial in delivering, on average, double the production of rainfed farming and 40% of the world’s total food production. Jane Craigie discovers how farmers, policymakers and land investors navigate water availability and rights, and how technology helps preserve every precious drop in times of shortage, while too much rain grinds everyday farming to a halt.

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More than 3 billion cups of coffee are drunk every day but how did the bean inside a fruit become synonymous with kick starting our mornings with a caffeine hit to wake us up? Jane Craigie speaks to growers and traders who explore the history and culture of coffee and look to the future when the climate and growing conditions are looking likely to become more volatile. Jane discovers how coffee can be at the heart of social enterprises, empowering female workers and enabling communities to develop a social and economic infrastructure.

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Weeds are plants that are growing in the wrong place. Certain species can totally devastate farmers crops, resulting in huge losses of both productivity and income for the farmers. They can be the difference between survival and failure of a farm. But are they all bad?

Tom Radford is a forager who spends his life travelling around in his van making social media content on plants that are largely unknown but have amazing folklore attached. He talks us through some of the tastier edible species. Sledge Taylor farms cotton in Mississippi in the US; Guy Smith is an arable farmer in the Southeast of England.

Both are blighted by weeds that would, given the right conditions and without proper crop protection, put them out of business. Padma Commuri is one of the team of R&D at BASF whose job it is to strive to predict what species are coming down the line and how they will interact with a changing climate. It’s a bit of crystal ball gazing coupled with some scientific knowledge that will keep farmers in production and billions of mouths fed in the coming decades.

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Improving the sustainability of agriculture extends far beyond the production of food, as farmers share the global challenges of climate change mitigation, increasing space for nature and protecting resources. In this episode of The Science Behind your Salad, we explore the sustainability of food, land and food packaging, as well as the role that cities play in creating sustainable food systems and how farming contributes to the sustainability of cities themselves.  

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Sweet and juicy, plump and delicious: In this episode of The Science Behind Your Salad we’re telling the story behind the production and innovation of fruit salad! Apples, peaches and watermelons come under the spotlight in our whistle stop tour of the sweeter crops we love to eat.

We’ll hear from the lush orchards of England, the hot and dry peach fields of Northern Greece and the growers of a brand new Watermelon variety in Brazil as we take a snapshot of fruit production and innovation across the globe.

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If food waste could be represented as its own country, it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind China and the United States, according to the UN's environment program.  Each year around 2.5 billion tons of food is lost or wasted each year, leaving roughly 3.1 billion people without sufficient nutritious food to eat. In terms of carbon footprint, the resources needed to produce this wasted food has a carbon footprint of about 3.3 billion tons of CO2.

In this episode of The Science Behind Your Salad, Jane Craigie explores ways that can help reduce the amount of food that is lost, both close to production - from farmers' fields, storage or transport, and food that is wasted from our homes - plus possible charitable and community outlets for excess food.

Jane also discovers some future crops that may also help reduce the amount of food wasted and help to feed those missing out on food: look out for water lentils and sea squirts which could be coming to a plate near you soon. 

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