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.

The problem we wish to solve. Whole-genome sequencing of microbes offers new ways of understanding the development, transmission, and prevention of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). It is an exceptionally promising, rapidly developing area, which provides rapid, detailed genomic information on antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be used for diagnosis and surveillance of AMR in clinical and agricultural settings. While genomics (the field of DNA sequencing technologies and bioinformatics) has revolutionised our understanding of microbes and AMR, it is not currently clear how the rapid developments in genomics can be efficiently translated, at scale, into practical and cost-effective tools that reduce current and future harms associated with AMR. No single discipline can resolve this complex process of translation in isolation. Instead, transdisciplinary working is essential to progress the many possible ways genomics could contribute to countering the threat posed by AMR. These include an exploration of the better use of the UK's unique capabilities in the field of DNA sequencing technology R&D and development, the ethical implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyse large genomic datasets, the possibility of developing new diagnostic technologies to guide future prescribing in both human and veterinary medicine, and the possibility of using genomics to shape and change infection prevention and control practices across health and social care. These translational challenges require the input, expertise, and the establishment of a common language and set of goals from many perspectives. To this end, the Transdisciplinary Antimicrobial Resistance Genomics network (TARGet) will bring together researchers in social sciences, the humanities, biomedical and veterinary sciences, and applied health, and product developers, governmental organisations, industry, and the general public to bring genomics from the laboratory to clinical and veterinary medicine, and to leverage genomic information to inform the development of novel diagnostics and infection prevention practices. What the leadership team will do. We will support the growth of a dynamic network of diverse experts and organisations. The transdisciplinary leadership team are well-connected to multiple research communities across the UK and internationally, to industry and to other stakeholders in the NHS, social care and veterinary medicine. The leadership team is thus exceptionally well-placed to recruit a far-reaching network of different stakeholders all of whom will make valuable contributions to future research harnessing the potential of AMR genomics. The TARGet leadership team will be responsible for transdisciplinary network-building activities, including surveys, online and in-person meetings, and selecting transdisciplinary research projects for pump-priming funding. What the network will achieve. TARGet will initially use monthly transdisciplinary, interactive webinars that focus on the range of data-types, skills, knowledge, theories, and methods used across the full range of collaborating disciplines and organisations involved. In this way, the webinars ensure that every discipline's stakeholders learn about the others' perspectives and potential contributions. Activities in the first year will ensure the network develops a deep understanding of the multitudinous assets it has, and will increasingly work synergistically to translate the potential of AMR genomics into real-world actions and impacts. These online events will be complemented by major in-person plenary events. Finally, towards the end of the project, the activities of the network will focus on the documentation of successful implementation of AMR genomics across different sectors, and the co-production of a programme of future research projects and policy recommendations that rely on transdisciplinary working to deliver optimal solutions.

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.