Population growth will demand more food in the future and this will have be produced sensitively to prevent degrading our environment beyond repair. This was the key message from Oxford academic Charles Godfray, who addressed a mixed farming and urban audience in Aberdeen this week. The broad, big picture vision of “doing more with less” and reducing carbon emissions are getting quite repetitive and we need to become a bit more specific.

There was much made of nutrient recycling and working with nature to produce food. Well any farmer can tell you it is impossible to work against nature and we have been nutrient recycling for centuries with our mixed livestock and crop farms. It is time to get some of the future visions tied down to working farms and illustrate the changes they would like to see made.

Farmers will continue to make productivity gains, as we have done for over 200 years, and we will keep making resources stretch further for food production. But if there are to be seismic changes then we need to be told where we are heading.