How we produce and consume food has a huge bearing on multiple environmental problems including biodiversity loss, deforestation, climate change, water scarcity, and water pollution.

However, today, there is a major lack of comparable information about the environmental impacts of different food products produced using different practices:

• Few farmers measure their environmental impacts and those that do use different methods.
• Farmers struggle to access advice on how to reduce environmental issues.
• There is no standardised format for sharing environmental data in food supply chains or between researchers.
• There is a lack of publicly available data on the environmental impacts of foods produced using different practices in different geographies.

Without this information, the foundations for creating sustainable food supply-chains are missing.

The Oxford Martin Programme on Food Sustainability has created a data structure, data platform, and toolkit to calculate environmental impacts to help address these challenges. These are available on the HESTIA platform. The programme was initiated with funding from WWF-UK.

Now, with further funding from the Login5 Foundation, Defra, ADEME, Azura Group, UKRI, World Fish, IFPRI, the Ardevora Charitable Trust, EU Horizon, the Wellcome Trust, and the Oxford Martin School, we are scaling up our work and making this digital infrastructure available to farmers, other actors in the food supply chain, and researchers through a number of partnerships with digital farm tools and research institutions. We are also testing how much our analytical toolkit can change farmer behaviour by undertaking ambitious randomised controlled trials with farmers in multiple countries.

Agriculture is the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, water scarcity and pollution, pesticide toxicity. It is also a major contributor to climate change. Despite this, today, very few farms measure their environmental impacts. Without this, neither farmers nor policymakers can make informed decisions about how to act.

We are providing farmers with HESTIA’s methods, models, and data in an accessible format to allow them to calculate, monitor changes in, and improve their environmental outcomes. We are running randomised control trials testing whether this changes their perceptions, behaviour, practices, and real farm outcomes.