New £2 million project to save UK from food shortages
Grant and Award Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 23-Jul-2025 07:11 ET (23-Jul-2025 11:11 GMT/UTC)
A new project to address vulnerabilities in the UK’s food supply chain – and protect the country from potential shortages – has been launched thanks to funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
The £2 million initiative is building on recent research that found over 40% of food experts believe widespread civil unrest linked to food shortages, such as demonstrations and violent looting, is possible or likely in the UK within the next 10 years.
High-quality milk remains in high demand, but managing the health of dairy cows is becoming increasingly challenging. To tackle this, researchers from Tokyo University of Science have developed an innovative location information-based technique that uses multi-camera systems to track individual cows across an entire barn. This method enables health monitoring, early disease detection, and gestation management, making it ideal for large-scale implementation to ensure dairy farm health and ensure consistent, high-quality milk production.
A pre-Columbian society in the Amazon developed a sophisticated agricultural engineering system that allowed them to produce maize throughout the year, according to a recent discovery by a team of researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, (Spain); the Universities of Exeter, Nottingham, Oxford, Reading and Southampton (UK); the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and Bolivian collaborators. This finding contradicts previous theories that dismissed the possibility of intensive monoculture agriculture in the region.
Xianming Shi, civil and architectural engineering department chair at the University of Miami, was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to research how to turn farming byproducts into sustainable asphalt.