Topic description and stories

Green and pleasant land: A farm near East Meon in Hampshire.

Farming loved but misunderstood, survey shows

23 Aug 2012

A YouGov Cambridge poll has revealed widespread affection for agriculture, even though there is a surprising level of ignorance about the sector and...

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Kharaneh shells

From foraging to farming: the 10,000-year revolution

23 Mar 2012

Excavation of 19,000-year-old hunter-gatherer remains, including a vast camp site, is fuelling a reinterpretation of the greatest fundamental shift...

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Gola Forest credit Jeremy Lindsell

Canopy commerce: forest conservation and poverty alleviation

03 Feb 2012

Innovative approaches for protecting the future of Sierra Leone’s Gola Forest – globally important for its biodiversity and its carbon reserves – are...

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Ben in the forest

‘Extreme Sleepover #2’ – a night in Ghana’s tropical forest

23 Dec 2011

In the second of a series of reports contributed by Cambridge researchers, zoologist Dr Ben Phalan ventures into a tropical forest to understand the...

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Ghana forest

Sparing or sharing? Protecting wild species may require growing more food on less land

02 Sep 2011

Separating land for nature and land for crops may be the best way to meet increased food demand with the least impact on wild species.

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Vegetables

Food security: your questions answered

31 Aug 2011

Over the past month, the University of Cambridge has been profiling research that addresses one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century – how...

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Irish tenants are evicted and their homes torn down under the supervision of troops

Whose fault is famine? What the world failed to learn from 1840s Ireland

19 Jul 2011

A new book by a Cambridge University academic revisits one of the worst famines in recorded history. The Irish Famine of the 1840s had terrible...

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Chocolate-backed Kingfisher

Farming and the fate of wild nature

19 Jul 2011

As the drive to increase food production gathers pace, conservation scientists suggest that reconciling food security with protecting biodiversity...

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Soil

In soil we trust

14 Jul 2011

Far from being merely ‘dirt’, soil plays a fundamental role in food production, water availability and biodiversity. A new research programme aims to...

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Vegetables in whole food market.

The future of food: your chance to ask the experts

04 Jul 2011

How can we feed the world’s expanding population? Should we be using GM technologies more to boost the yield of our crops? How will global warming...

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