Agricultural groups have appealed to ministers to put food and farming at the forefront of the new Natural History GSCE which was unveiled recently.

The NFU and Country Land and Business Association (CLA) have both issued calls to education minister Nadim Zahawi to ensure that an understanding of the rural economy and how food is produced is included on the curriculum.

NFU chief education manager Joshua Payne said: “We passionately believe that learning about farming and food production should form a key part of teaching sustainability within the GCSE curriculum. It is incredibly important for children to understand the importance of farming to rural communities, its role in feeding the nation and to showcase careers in agriculture.”

A new project, involving a number of UK research centres, is to work towards the development of high-fibre white bread.

The wheat varieties, which will be used in the programme, have been specifically developed by staff at Rothamsted Research for the UK and Irish climate.

Leading the interdisciplinary project team are staff from the University of Reading. They will be looking at the supply chain for high-fibre wheat production and the impact on the health of consumers. Consumer acceptability will also be explored including taste testing of high-fibre white bread in a major supermarket within three years.

An ambitious research project investigating technology which produces food products from grass is set to launch after receiving £2m funding. The Pasture to Plate (P2P) project, led by Harper Adams and the University of Bath, seeks to develop a revolutionary system for converting grass into food.

After processing the grass, researchers will separate out a wide range of initial nutrients, after which they will culture yeast on the remaining material. Scientists will then convert it into oils and further extractable edible food fractions, with any residual material converted into a nutrient rich fertilizer.

Principal investigator for the project, Dr Richard Green, said: “It is very efficient – we estimate that from around one and a half to two kilos of dried grass, we can produce a kilo of edible food fractions.

The four UK Agri-Tech Centres – CHAP, CIEL, Agri-EPI and Agrimetrics – are progressing a sustainable farming partnership with world leading agricultural research and training organisation, Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands.

The new partnership will seek to advance science and innovation to help meet the challenges of sustainable global food production, including the reduction of its environmental impact.

Recognising the UK Agri-Tech Centres’ position as the hub of UK agrifood innovation, WUR approached the Centres with a proposal to collaborate. The partners will seek to establish new, joint opportunities for innovative public-private partnerships in agrifood science and business.

Dining on the likes of lab-grown meat or ground-up insects could lead to big savings in carbon emissions and water, as well as freeing up land for nature. That's the finding of a study calculating the environmental benefits of "greener" foods hitting our plates.

Scientists say pressures on the planet could fall by more than 80% with such foods, compared with the typical European diet. But it's not yet clear if consumers will want to shift their eating habits. A host of non-conventional foods are being developed with the aim of providing food rich in protein and other nutrients, while being gentle on the planet by using less water and land.

Scientists in Finland studied the nutritional profile of some of these products and looked at three measures of environmental pressure: the use of water, land and potential carbon emissions. They say switching meat, dairy and other animal products for alternative foods could reduce these impacts by more than 80%, while providing a more complete range of essential nutrients than a purely vegetarian or vegan diet.

The largest ever study of protected areas - places "set aside" ostensibly for nature - has revealed that most do not actively benefit wildlife.

Scientists examined the impact of 1,500 protected areas in 68 countries, focusing their analysis on wetlands and waterbirds. They found that, in terms of how wildlife fared, success varied hugely around the world and depended a great deal on how an area was managed.

The study was published in Nature. Its authors say that habitats need to be managed effectively in ways that provide a boost for nature.

Defra has approved field trials of genetically modified barley that scientists say could reduce the need for synthetic fertilisers.

The trial, run by researchers at the Crop Science Centre in Cambridge, will evaluate whether improved crop interaction with naturally occurring soil fungi can result in more sustainable food production.

The barley variety has been genetically modified to boost expression levels of the NSP2 gene. This gene is naturally present in barley and boosting its expression enhances the crop’s capacity to engage with mycorrhizal fungi.

An agri-tech company has made significant strides in its work to develop a range of fruit harvesting robots to support the agriculture sector. The raspberry picking robots developed by Fieldwork Robotics have now been deployed commercially in two locations in Portugal.

The robots – fitted with four picking arms – are successfully working autonomously, with its sensor technology and grippers having been completely redesigned to reduce slippage and cut the harvesting time. As a result, the fruit being picked has passed all quality controls, with the company now working to further speed the picking process so that each robot can gather 2kg of fruit per hour.

Fieldwork Robotics was launched in 2016 to develop and commercialise the work of Lecturer in Robotics Dr Martin Stoelen, and the company is now based in Cambridge.

Robots could be used to pick fruit under plans to stop Britain from suffering food shortages. Ministers have ordered a review into new measures to prevent empty supermarket shelves, after watching the impact of the war in Ukraine on global supply chains.

The upcoming food strategy White Paper has been rewritten to include plans to reduce Britain’s reliance on foreign imports and the impact of soaring gas prices and climate change on farmers.

They could include automation of farms to guard against labour shortages and new investment in “vertical farming”, which would increase efficiency.

Trials to grow British strawberries all year-round in world’s largest vertical farm set to start in Bristol this month.

Berry Gardens along with the Jones Food Company plans to collaborate on a trial to vertically grow British strawberries at a new research and development site in Bristol, with stock likely to start hitting shelves in winter 2023.

If successful, the trial aims to supply around 70% of the UK’s fresh produce within the next ten years to meet demands of British consumers, with customers expressing a ‘significant interest in stocking vertically grown strawberries.’