We are faced with meeting the agricultural demands of a growing population estimated to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050 on soils depleted of essential nutrients, with declining yields and a projected reduction in future rainfall in key agricultural regions. A circular economy between agriculture and organic waste streams can recycle essential resources for farming through the recovery of water, biomass, and nutrients from sanitation waste solids, effluents, and livestock manure at scale. This offers benefits to agroecological practices in farming by reducing the reliance on chemical fertiliser inputs with multiple benefits that improve soil health, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farming, and reduce water pollution in drainage from fields. However, there are potential risks and challenges associated with this solution and these need to be fully understood to enable resource recovery to operate in a safe and sustainable manner in the long term. Firstly, the gastrointestinal tracts of humans and animals are a source of pathogens to the environment and agriculture food chain. So, reusing these wastes could potentially spread these pathogens to the food crops we consume. Secondly, manure and sewage are sources of veterinary and medical chemicals to the environment; these compounds can enhance a microbe's ability to resist treatment drugs, such as antibiotics. This ability to resist treatment drugs can spread to other microbes important for plant, animal, and human diseases. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health crisis that is predicted to cause 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Currently, livestock and the environment are recognised as reservoirs of antimicrobial resistant microbes and implicated in the dissemination of these AMR microbes. Science-based methods to assess the environmental, livestock and human health risks of combined exposure to antimicrobial selective compounds and AMR microbes are therefore central to fully realising the potential benefits of a sanitation-agriculture circular economy. Models, analytical tools, and quantitative assessment methods to understand, measure and assess the impacts of agricultural exposure routes urgently warrant scientific attention. Through understanding the safety risks recycling waste streams pose, new interventions can be devised to minimise these risks, making resource recycling a viable mechanism to increase soil and farm productivity. Working with water utility companies and the National Pig Centre, we will investigate how water and farm waste can be recycled to be used in agriculture. Using laboratory models, we will identify where pathogens and chemicals aggregate along the different waste streams, thus identify where interventions need to be made. Using this information, we will define a risk assessment analysis to tackle pathogen and chemical buildup. We propose to build on the 'one-health, one environment' approach to AMR by acknowledging the connectivity between humans, animals and the environment. This project will support the development of a UK sanitation-circular economy and build a UK-led innovation network with global reach. The overall aim of the project is to build a community of educational, industry, farming, and government colleagues to increase the capacity of the UK to address global pollution challenges associated with adopting a circular economy to support agricultural production. A circular economy approach is essential in meeting global agricultural needs, especially enhancing the role that farming can play in climate control and our need to move towards Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions. This proposal will pave the way in achieving this goal whilst minimising the impact of utilising waste materials on the environment and animal and human health.

Our seminar series aims to understand and improve UK consumers' decisions about nutrition, food safety, and food waste. Our goals align with DEFRA, the Food and Agricultural Organisation and others who use the modern view of 'food security' for developed countries, by defining it as access to food that is nutritious, affordable, safe, and sustainable, while producing minimum waste. Better food safety and reduced food waste are also high priority for the EU. Improvement is needed because (1) foodborne illnesses amount to 17 mln cases per year in the UK, including 20,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths; (2) warnings about food risks can cause undue alarm and increase food waste; (3) UK domestic food waste is 7 mln tonnes per year, of which 4.2 mln tonnes is deemed preventable; (4) Fresh food is more nutritious but also more perishable, potentially affecting food safety and food waste; (5) UK consumers are increasingly making unhealthy food choices, contributing to 62% of UK adults being overweight or obese, and leading to health problems that cost the NHS more than £5 billion per year. Our seminar series is timely and novel because it follows calls to better understand and inform the complex decisions consumers face about nutrition, food safety, and food waste. We aim to identify strategies that help consumers to achieve nutritious food choices that both improve food safety and reduce food waste. Our seminar series has been designed by our team of practitioners and academics, with the goal of achieving the best impact. Our practitioner team members come from the Food Standards Agency which aims to improve food safety and healthy eating, as well as at the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) which aims to reduce food waste. Our academic team members come from the University of Leeds Centre for Decision Research and the Human Appetite Research Unit who are experts in consumer food choice, domestic food waste, and risk communication, as well as from the NewCastle University Food and Society Group at the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development who are experts in food safety and risk communication. Through 9 seminars to be held over 3 years, we will create a lasting network of users and academics who have mostly been working separately on these different topics to date. We have confirmed academic and practitioner speakers from across the UK and overseas who are key experts in the relevant domains. Seminars will be hosted at and promoted by participating universities and practitioner agencies, thus drawing diverse audiences. We will fund the travel of junior researchers and PhD students, for whom participation provides a unique opportunity for creating new networks and research ideas. Our project will identify strategies for helping consumers to improve food safety and reduce food waste. The PI and her team of users and academics will build on their international connections to share our findings at meetings with academics, users, consumers, and other interested parties worldwide. Our findings will be summarized in joint review papers that represent practitioner and academic experiences with developing effective strategies for helping consumers with food-related decisions. Our project website will provide public access to recordings and presentation slides from our seminar series, with information for academics, users and consumers about how to improve food safety and reduce food waste. Academics and users will work together to write joint grant proposals, with the goal of designing, implementing and testing the most promising strategies, thus identifying the best ways for helping consumers to make healthier, safer, and less wasteful food choices.

Bringing together world-class researchers from Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol, Cambridge and City Universities, this proposal seeks to transform the UK food system 'from the ground up' via an integrated programme of interdisciplinary research on healthy soil, healthy food and healthy people (H3). The H3 Consortium addresses the links between food production and consumption and takes a whole systems approach to identify workable paths towards a transformed UK food system, delivered via a series of interventions: on farm, in food manufacturing, distribution and retail, and in terms of the health implications and inequalities associated with food consumption in UK homes and communities. The proposed research addresses all of the UK government policy drivers outlined in the Call text from diet-related ill health to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, from biodiversity to soil health and water quality, rebuilding trust in the food system, promoting clean growth and supporting the translation of scientific research and new technologies for the benefit of the UK economy and society. Our approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, combining world-class soil and plant scientists, health researchers, economists and social scientists The research team have many years' experience of working together, leading interdisciplinary research centres, co-supervising PhD students and collaborating on numerous research projects including the N8 agri-food programme. We take an integrated approach to the agri-food system, recognizing its inherent complexity and addressing the governance challenges that arise from the rapidly changing regulatory landscape. Our proposed research involves six interconnected work-packages. The first advances novel growing technologies via fundamental research into agricultural practices that have the potential to transform the quality of food we grow while minimising its environmental impact. The second aims to combine hydroponic and conventional soil-based agriculture, creating a linked network of hybrid demonstrator farms in peri-urban areas to encourage improvements in dietary health and environmental sustainability. The third extends these ideas to the landscape scale, evaluating the benefits of regenerative agriculture in terms of reduced fertiliser and pesticide use and increased food quality. The fourth addresses the key public health challenges of micro-nutrient deficiency through the application of state of the art methods of biofortification, enhancing the nutritional value of foods that are already part of established UK diets. The fifth seeks to increase the consumption of fibre with its attendant health and sustainability benefits, based on lessons learnt from the Danish wholegrain partnership; while the sixth seeks to increase food system resilience to economic, health and environmental shocks through collaborative research with retailers and consumers. Three cross-cutting themes (CCTs) provide further integration across the work-packages. The first focuses on the application of integrative methods such as LCA and scenario-building approaches to assess the environmental, social and economic impact of different interventions and policy options. The second focuses on issues of consumer demand, public acceptability and affordability; while the third ensures that stakeholder involvement features consistently throughout the programme, with a strong emphasis on knowledge exchange and impact within and beyond the five-year funding period. The H3 Consortium is led by Professors Peter Jackson and Duncan Cameron who co-direct the Institute for Sustainable Food at the University of Sheffield. They are joined by a core team, comprising the work-package and CCT leaders, a wider group of co-investigators and PDRAs, and an experienced business development manager, focused on maximising the impact of our research in government, business and civil society.

The "Internet of Food Things" will create an interdisciplinary network that defragments and expands the UK's food digital economy. Food and drink is the largest manufacturing sector of the UK economy. The food supply chain from farm to consumer generates £108bn GVA per year and employs 3.9m people. In addition, food has highly significant social and environmental impacts. Obesity alone, including downstream health impacts such as diabetes, heart disease etc, costs the UK economy £49bn per annum. There are still c. 1,000,000 cases of food poisoning per year costing £1.5bn p.a.. Food generates up to 30% of the UK's road freight, but 10MT of food, generating 20MTCO2e of GHG emissions, are wasted each year. Digital technology has the potential to transform the food chain, for example, opportunities (that map onto the EPSRC DE Network strategy) include but are not limited to; - New business models via distributed ledger technology (DLT) to underpin the traceability of food. The recent Holmes report identified food as one of the key seven UK industry sectors most likely to benefit from DLTs. - The creation of a "data trust" for the food sector to underpin data sharing, trust and interoperability within complex supply chains. - Wide scale application of the internet of things (IoT) for the service community, for example, the use of IoT by domestic users (refrigerators, cooking devices etc) to improve health outcomes and reduce waste. - The development of new digital labelling protocols that assist with consumer use of food as well as supply chain optimisation, - The use of novel digital technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence) to reduce food waste by optimising whole supply chains from manufacturer to consumer. Hitherto these opportunities have not or are only partially realised. There is an urgent need to defragment the digitally inspired academic community and connect it to food industry practitioners. Although the digital focus is in within EPSRC's remit (IoT, blockchain, data trusts, interoperability issues), we will multiply impact by including interdisciplinary contributions from food science and technology practitioners, policy makers, engineers, management specialists and colleagues in social and behavioural sciences. The network will include academia, industry and consumer interests. The industry interest covers the whole food and digital innovation chain including food manufacturers (e.g. Food and Drink Federation, EPSRC Food CIM), IoT and digital specialists (Siemens and IMS Evolve), the HVM Catapult and regulators such as the Food Standards Agency and GS1 the international agency that sets data standards (bar codes) for retail. Consumers will be represented through out, but the inclusion of food retailers within the consortium provides access to unrivalled data sets demonstrating behaviours. The DE network will facilitate a number of key actions, including a marketing, social media and work shop / conference campaign that yields a large scale (up to 500 persons) network who have mutual interests within the food digital domain. We will host one main conference per year and in addition 3 facilitated workshops p.a. to deep dive key questions within the food domain. We will fund a range of pilot studies (£350K applied) and detailed reviews to underpin horizon scanning. All the research challenges will be co created with industry. We expect that the network will facilitate onward research funding and catalyse interest in the food digital economy. In addition to network activities, we will deliver a comprehensive pathway to impact that engages professional practitioners as well as the general public and schools.

This research partnership involves a two-year programme of work focused on the ways in which rapidly changing cultures of poultry meat consumption and agricultural systems in particular Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) shape antibiotic use/misuse in farming, with implications for tackling the global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) health challenge. AMR, or in lay terms drug-resistant infections, is one of the top five priorities for the World Health Organization (WHO). The 2016 O'Neill report into 'Tackling Drug-Resistant Infections Globally' warns that if the challenge is left unaddressed, deaths resulting from AMR on a global scale are predicted within the next three decades to reach some 10 million per year. AMR in agriculture and food systems is a critical area of concern, with increasing cases reported of strains of bacteria such as E.Coli, Campylobacter and Salmonella developing resistance to particular groups of antibiotics. While antibiotics are a necessary tool to maintain health and welfare on the farm, the problem is their inappropriate and disproportionate use in animals, thereby reducing availability for humans and also catalysing resistance. The first aim of the research partnership is to evaluate the relationships between changing urban diets incorporating increased meat consumption, transforming food systems and the use/misuse of antibiotics in agriculture. It will do so through a focus on the poultry sectors of Kenya and Malawi, in particular the urban contexts of Nairobi and Lilongwe, given the rapid rise of poultry production and consumption in both places and the increased and weakly regulated use of antibiotics in production. Moreover, Kenya and Malawi are a Lower Middle Income Country and a Least Developed Country, respectively, on a continent predicted to see the highest mortality rate from AMR by 2050. The second aim is to generate culturally and geographically sensitive approaches to antibiotic reduction and stewardship initiatives in these contexts, in ways that improve implementation of their governments' AMR National Action Plans. The premise of the research is that policies and targets for the reduction of antibiotic misuse in agriculture, whilst shaped by the WHO and a 'One Health' agenda, are most likely to be effective if their implementation is responsive to the specific pressures, constraints and opportunities experienced by farmers in the context of the particular food systems in which they are embedded, and to the cultural values shaping everyday farming practice. The partnership brings together an interdisciplinary team and wider network of researchers and policy-makers across Kenya, Malawi and the UK. The core team represent the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, the University of Malawi, Newcastle University, Southampton University and UCL. Collaboration in the partnership involves dialogue between the disciplines of Geography, History, Epidemiology, Medicine, Anthropology, Microbiology and Art to understand how cultural values and practices are integral to antibiotic use/misuse in the particular food systems and poultry sectors of Kenya and Malawi. The partnership also involves influential AMR policy institutions on its advisory board, including the UK's Food Standards Agency, the UN's Codex Alimentarius, Malawi's Ministry of Health and the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya as Project Partners. The model for the partnership involves a programme of interwoven scoping research, involving secondary and primary data collection in Kenya and Malawi, and three intensive workshops in London, Nairobi and Lilongwe. Research will develop understanding of the embeddedness of antibiotic use and AMR awareness in everyday cultures and practices of subsistence and commercial farming. From this research, recommendations will be made to Kenyan and Malawian AMR policy-makers regarding culturally-sensitive and effective approaches to antibiotic stewardship.