Food and Natural Resources

Smallholder farmers have to grow as much food as possible on very little land, while the weather becomes more extreme and harder to predict. Synthetic pesticides help, but they also harm ecosystems and human health. The EU-funded UPSCALE project tested whether plants themselves can protect maize from pests, and its team carried out more than 150 interviews with farmers and experts along the way – and at the end you can check whether there is room for nature in your own everyday choices.

Smallholder farmers in East Africa work plots of less than two hectares, yet they produce up to 70% of their countries’ food. The EU-funded PrAEctiCe project set out to support them by turning agroecology, a broad and rather abstract idea, into concrete indicators that advisors can use on real farms. The tools were piloted in living labs in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania — and at the end you can check how well you have followed agroecology from idea to numbers.

Fish farming is booming, yet only 37% of Europe’s surface waters meet environmental requirements. SusWater tackled this with an unusual toolkit: filters made from cellulose, chitosan, starch and gelatine, fungi taken from wastewater, light-driven catalysts and a pocket-sized sensor for trace pollutants. It is a field where chemists, biologists and materials scientists work side by side – and at the end you can check whether you have what it takes to be a clean-water detective.

Planning what millions of people will eat twenty-five years from now sounds like a job for science fiction, yet a Horizon Europe project spent three and a half years doing exactly that. FoSTA-Health studied Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia and found that a food system is far more than farming: it is soil, animal health, human health, trade and policy tangled into one knot. The team sketched four possible routes to 2050 – and at the end you can check whether you think in systems or in separate cases.

Around 330 million male chicks are killed in the EU every year, because they lay no eggs and put on too little meat to pay for their feed. Germany and France have already banned the practice, and other Member States are pushing for an EU-wide ban, which leaves hatcheries with a question they have to answer before anything hatches. A German team funded by the European Innovation Council shines light through the shell and lets an algorithm read the answer - a mix of ethics, optics and code that is worth asking yourself about before you pick a degree.