Future Agrifood Systems

What are the main challenges

How can we maximise the ‘amount’ of products from a given piece of land, to promote a shift from a fossil-based society towards society using cascading technologies.  

  • Improved farming practices that gives higher yield of the land 

  • Crops not only tailored for a primary product, but that are also tailored for use of the resulting by-products  

  • ‘Biotech’ processing, advanced and digitalised (precision) fermentation, biorefining and downstream processing 

  • Production of innovative and novel foods and ingredients 

  • Designed-in sustainability (environmental, economic, human and social). 

  • Resilient rural communities, encourages sustainable healthy diets, increases whole value chain dynamics.  

  • Legislators and the demands and restrictions of society 

  • Societal sustainable farming ecosystems 

  • Monopolies - security - vulnerability - policy decisions  

  • Paradigm shift to perennial crops - "higher yield" of the land - products + by-products - cascading technologies - precision fermentation + biorefining 

  • Development of a living lab 

  • European perspective - avoid "Danish blinkers" 

  • Shift from fossil society 

  • Novel foods 


Key characteristics of the Hub

  • Multi actor covering all aspects of the ecosystem of farming (and before, i.e. including crop breeding) and extending into processing, biorefining, biotech, precision fermentation, food, novel foods, and consumers 

  • Use existing demonstration projects e.g. grass to human proteins + feed, and new demonstration projects, as ‘living labs’ 

  • Focus on circularity, including recycling nutrients back to the land and soil science. 

  • Need of feedback loops to the other disciplines. 

  • Keep the large Hub theme, but within the hub people can go together in subgroups for target specific aspects. Finding areas of interest. Must be interdisciplinary.


What kind of research areas would complement the Hub research?

  • Social sciences, legislators, society, industry and companies, researchers 

  • Data scientists, bioinformatics 

  • Trade organization and legislations.  

  • Novel food and feed 

  • Include producers, consumers, farmers 

  • Economics and business 

  • Soil science 

  • Helix lab 

See presentations from workshops

Unfolding the future

A social science and humanities (SSH) approach toward the future of agrifood systems / by Sunny Mosangzi Xu, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School

Academic Coordinators


Timothy Hobley

National Food Institute

Technical University of Denmark

Phone: +45 45 25 27 06

E-mail: tjho@food.dtu.dk 


Nanna Viereck

Food Analytics and Biotechnology

University of Copenhagen

Phone: +45 35 33 35 02

E-mail: nav@food.ku.dk


Mette Lübeck

Department of Chemistry and Bioscience

Aalborg University

Phone: +45 99 40 25 89

Cell: +45 24 47 04 18

E-mail: mel@bio.aau.dk

Administrative Coordinators


Hanne Vibeke Seidler

Special Consultant

Email: hsja@food.dtu.dk

Phone: +45 93 51 07 95


Bodil Hjarvard

Academic Employee

Email: bohj@agro.au.dk

Phone: +45 93 52 29 26