Our research

Action Against Stunting Hub

Professor Bhavani Shankar leads the food systems work package of this £19M collaboration. This work focuses on investigating the food environments faced by households in the study sites to improve diets and help alleviate stunting.

UKRI GCRF funded project

Feeding the world with foam

The Desert Garden project is a unique project born out of innovative science and is giving families displaced by war the opportunity to grow fresh food in the desert using discarded mattresses.

Desert Garden project

Forgotten Food

A team of scientists is growing a type of rice from India that had become extinct with the spread of higher-yielding types, as part of a project to revive recipes and flavours that have been lost.

AHCR GCRF Funded project

Exploring and Exploiting Epigenetic Plant Immunity

The University of Sheffield and the plant breeding company Enza Zaden are working in partnership to exploit stress memory for the next generation of disease resistant plants.

The four year project is funded by a BBSRC Industrial Partnership Award from UKRI. The project’s main aim is to develop new tools and resources to explore and exploit this epigenetically controlled plant immunity.

The next generation of disease resistant plants

ChemPrime

Concluding in October 2020, ChemPrime's main objective was to identify pathways for commercialisation of priming chemicals as a viable crop protection technology. Our researchers have optimised this technology to minimise effects on crop yield and have devised ways of implementing it for integrated crop protection strategies.

A new crop protection strategy

The hidden potential of urban horticulture

Research led by Dr Jill Edmondson found that growing fruit and vegetables in just 10 per cent of a city’s gardens and other urban green spaces could provide 15 per cent of the local population with their ‘five a day’.

UKRI EPSRC and ISCF funded project

Hydroponic growing in an abandoned school

In Sheffield, the team has set up an urban foam farm in an abandoned primary school and is working to increase access to fresh produce in a food desert, and train the community to grow food locally using this soil-free system.

Tinsley hydroponics

Sheffield: Resilient city

Teams from the Institute for Sustainable Food are working on low impact agriculture in urban spaces, building mini-farms in old shipping containers — with the first prototype opening in 2020. This approach, funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund Impact Accelerator Account, British Council and the Global Challenges Research Fund, addresses the entire agrifood system

Urban mini-farms

Harnessing and integrating disease suppressive microbes and synthetic soils for sustainable, low input horticulture

This £1.5 million grant from the BBSRC will help our experts led by Professor Duncan Cameron, Institute director, to understand how beneficial bacteria protect plants’ health – in a similar way to gut bacteria in humans.

BBSRC funded project

Signals in the soil: Real-time and Continuous Monitoring of Phosphates in the Soil

This new £1.8m research project led by the University of Sheffield is supporting the development of sensors to detect phosphate in soil, to help farmers increase their crop yield and reduce fertiliser use.

NERC funded project

Mapping arsenic in rice

A team of UK scientists led by Dr Manoj Menon are investigating rice plants in a bid to find out whether people are inadvertently consuming dangerous levels of arsenic – a deadly poison and carcinogen – through rice, meat and dairy products.

STFC Food Network+ funded project

Agri-Environmental Governance Post-Brexit

The UK’s decision to leave the EU is seen by the government as an opportunity to reform UK agricultural land policy. Researchers from Sheffield and Reading will work with farmers, stakeholders and Defra to develop a model for co-designing the new post-Brexit Environmental Land Management system.

Reforming UK agricultural land policy

Business as usual ‘no longer an option’ for Europe’s food system

The Evidence Review Report, A sustainable food system for the European Union, provides an evidence base for the scientific opinion of the European Commission’s Chief Scientific Advisors. The working group was led by Professor Peter Jackson, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Food at the University of Sheffield.

The SAPEA report

STFC Food Network+

The University of Sheffield led network brings together more than 750 international and multidisciplinary researchers from across the agri-food sector to work with experts from STFC’s research facilities, all with the aim of solving some of the world’s greatest food sustainability challenges.

The STFC Food Network +

Local food, Covid-19 and the future of the UK's food systems

The local food sector came into focus during the Covid-19 pandemic as the UK’s mainstream food systems experienced shocks and shifts. This project examines this period and shows how we can enhance the resilience of the local food sector and of the wider food system.

Enhancing local food system resilience

Food vulnerability during COVID-19

This UKRI ESRC funded research project, led by Dr Hannah Lambie-Mumford, maps and monitors responses addressing concerns about insufficient food access during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Informing food access policy and practice