Congratulations to Grantham Scholar Nicole Kennard on the publication of her work comparing resource use for tomato production.
The publication shows preliminary results from Nicole’s work comparing resource and material use on urban, peri-urban, and rural tomato farms in Georgia, USA.
Nicole presented on this work at the 2020 Urban Foods Systems Symposium led by Kansas State University. Results showed that small, organic farms could achieve higher yields than larger, conventional farms. But this required intensive management, high labour availability, farmer experience, and often higher resource / material input.
This work feeds into Nicole’s further research looking at the environmental impacts of local vegetable production in the U.S. and UK. Read the proceedings paper here.
Nicole recently completed a Post Fellowship with UK Parliament. For this she gave a parliamentary briefing on pesticides, health and post-Brexit regulation. You can find out more here.
The Foodhall Project a social eating space and community hub in the centre of Sheffield. They tackle social isolation and food waste through communal meals made from surplus food in a café setting on a ‘contribute what you can basis.’ Nicole volunteers’ at Foodhall and we interviewed her about her work there during the pandemic. To find out more about Nicole’s work at Foodhall, you can read our interview with her.
The Grantham Centre has many people working on sustainability and food, especially soil health. If you want to find out more, then check out our soil research page.
Image by Photo by Julia from Pexels.