WORKING IN SUSTAINABLE food and agriculture means confronting some of the biggest wicked problems of our time: climate change, declining fresh water, a projected global population of nine billion people, and the planet’s ability to supply their needs for food, fibre and energy. Solutions to any one raises problems in solving the others at the nexus of water, energy and food production.

For some time I have had a hunch that remedies lie in things that grow, that come from the soil: things of an agrarian nature. Can we harness the prolific and continuous energy from the sun, through nature’s mechanism of photosynthesis, to meet our needs for food, fibre and energy? Can the planet support a healthy population half as big again? Biomass for green energy production, algae for oil, closed-loop agricultural systems for the production of nutritious food and fibre – these are the kind of things-that-grow scenarios with which I am preoccupied.