In conversation with Prof Steve Kelly: The visions for Sustainable Agriculture at EIT
EIT’s Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture Program is on a mission to future-proof our global food system. It will develop innovations to feed a growing global population, while mitigating impacts on biodiversity and climate change.
The Opportunity
Enabling farmers to produce healthier and more nutritious food with less land and fewer resources is one of humanity's greatest opportunities. This program will address that opportunity, leveraging advances in plant breeding, artificial intelligence and global collaborations. It seeks to accelerate the development and distribution of the seeds and technologies that will enable the world’s farmers to support society into the next century and beyond.
Steve will work alongside a rapidly growing team of plant scientists, data scientists, economists and policy makers.
About Steve
The Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture Program is being led by Professor Steve Kelly, who is also a Professor of Plant Science at the University of Oxford and co-founder and chief scientific officer of Wild Bioscience Ltd – a startup working to enhance crop varieties to improve their yield. With a background in genomics, plant science and evolutionary biology, Steve has worked on challenges from dissecting the molecular basis of variation in productivity in plants, to using genetic data to drive innovation in technology and crop improvement.
Learn more about Prof Steve Kelly here
Hear from Steve himself on the vision and work of the Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture Program:
Why does food security and agriculture matter?
We live on a beautiful, green planet. Plants produce all the air we breathe and all the food we eat. They shape the earth, hold back the oceans, and create ecosystems. They sculpt our world and provide the foundation for life as we know it.
Humanity has taken a small number of these plants and adapted them to produce our food. These food plants have become humanity's largest interface with the natural world, replacing almost half of our planet’s natural ecosystems. Because of this, working with these plants holds the potential not only directly impact our health and wellbeing, but can also have a profound impact on our planet. I believe, that enabling these plants to produce more food, with fewer resources, and reduced impact on biodiversity holds the potential not only to address some of humanity's greatest challenges, but also to create substantial positive impacts for our planet.
What drew you to EIT?
Developing impactful technologies in food, particularly in food plants themselves, is challenging. The life cycles of crop plants are measured in months (or even years), and developing a new variety can take several generations. Once a new variety is created, scaling up the number of seeds needed to achieve impact can take several more years. As a result, bringing a new innovation in plant sciences from concept to market can take decades. These long timelines require sustained support and careful integration with commercial and policy teams from the very beginning to fully realise the impact of the science.
The idea of directly embedding cutting-edge plant science research within an institute that also develops the policy, economic and AI innovations needed to maximise the impact of this research really appeals to me. It is this connectivity that drew me to EIT, and I truly believe that this integrated approach holds great potential for tackling complex global challenges in food security and sustainable agriculture that cannot be addressed in isolation.
What are you most excited to work on at EIT?
We are excited to leverage recent developments in AI to help deliver the best seeds to farmers, develop new crop varieties that produce more food with fewer inputs, and reduce the environmental impact of agriculture. In particular, we are eager to harness advanced breeding techniques to shorten the timeline from concept to market and to collaborate with world-leading plant science research centers to bring the world’s most impactful innovations to the people that need them.
What impact do you hope to have?
We hope to improve the productivity of every farm on earth. We also hope to develop the crop plants of the future, enabling farmers to grow more with less - helping humanity sustain future populations with less land and reduced impact on the natural world.
What does a collaborative approach mean to you?
Food systems have the potential to drive positive impacts on health, climate change and even reverse the world-wide decline in biodiversity. However, no single innovation can solve these complex challenges. Instead, the solution to these challenges requires thousands of parallel changes that span the entire food system - from seeds to growers, all the way to consumers and governments. Only by viewing the system as a whole can we create truly sustainable solutions.
Our efforts here at EIT are inherently collaborative, and this collaboration transcends disciplinary boundaries, connecting plant scientists, data scientists, farmers, economists and policymakers. We strongly believe that this integrated approach holds great promise for accelerating the impact of scientific innovation and helping to solve some of the greatest challenges of our time.