About Richard

Professor McDowell is the Chief Scientist for the National Science Challenge: Our Land and Water, a Principal Scientist at AgResearch and Professor of soil and water quality at Lincoln University. He has degrees from Lincoln and Cambridge Universities. Before joining AgResearch 15 years ago he was employed by the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service involved in nutrient research and aiding in policy development. He is a fellow of the New Zealand Society of Soil Science, and has written over 300 books and journal articles on soil and water quality issues. He has a special interest in providing options and tools to mitigate water quality contamination from a variety of land uses, while maintaining profitable primary production enterprises.

Professor McDowell is the Theme leader for “Delivering resilient agricultural production systems at multiple spatial and temporal scales”. He co-facilitated a workshop at the TempAg kick-off meeting in Paris 2015. The workshop defined a research question for a pilot activity (PA1.1): “How can sustainability frameworks, metrics and tools and their implementation be enhanced to future-proof agricultural decision making at multiple levels on multiple scales?”. Outputs exploring this question are described in the pilot activity for Theme 1, and the proceedings of the 12th European International Farming Systems Association.

About Ag Research

Agriculture is New Zealand's largest export income earner. AgResearch plays a key role in delivering new knowledge and technologies which underpin the pastoral, agri-food and agri-technology value chains. We lead or partner with other providers to research the following areas:

• Pasture-based animal production systems

• New pasture plant varieties

• Agriculture-derived greenhouse gas mitigation and pastoral climate change adaption

• Agri-food and bio-based products and agri-technologies

• Integrated social and biophysical research to support pastoral, agri-food and agri-technology sector development.

• Biosecurity, land, soil and freshwater management

• Food and beverage sector (including foods for human nutrition and health, food technologies and food safety).

AgResearch is also the host of the New Zealand National Science Challenge – Our Land and Water. The Challenge has a 10-year horizon to invest in research that: enhances primary sector production and productivity while maintaining and improving our land and water quality for future generations.

About Henrik

Henrik Moller retired from his position as a Senior researcher at the Centre for Sustainability in October 2014. He is currently the Principal Investigator and Company Director of 'Ecosystems Consultants'.

Henrik promotes sound environmental management and policy formation in a way that is inclusive and invites lasting bottom-up solutions to land and natural resource challenges. His research and outreach supports a diverse range of philosophies, values and stakeholders like business interests, farmers, cultures, communities, NGOs and government agencies. Henrik is the Science Leader of NZ's Sustainability Dashboard project, which works with growers and postharvest processes across wine, kiwifruit, organic, forestry and Māori businesses across NZ to co-design sustainability assessment for market accreditation, environmental reporting and learning for sustainability.

About Fleur

Fleur Marchand is coordinator of research in Agricultural and Farm Development, is also a doctor in science (UA, 2006), and an agricultural engineer (UGent, 2001). She has worked for the Social Science Unit at ILVO, from 2007. Fleur interacts with stakeholders from sustainable agriculture and food chains, and is responsible for different national and international projects on these topics. For example, she coordinates a EU-H2020 project AgriDemo-F2F in which peer to peer learning on open commercial farms is studied. Fleur is also responsible for 5 PhD students, that examine: collaboration in the agri-food chain; learning initiatives for sustainable agriculture and the use of sustainability assessment tools; and perspectives for agro-ecology within the beef and dairy sector. Furthermore, she is Professor at the University of Antwerp where she is responsible for courses on methodologies and techniques for interdisciplinary research. 

About the Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research

The Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research (ILVO) is a Flemish Scientific Institute. As such, it belongs to the Flemish Government's Agriculture and Fisheries Policy Area. As a leading governmental research institute it conducts fundamental, policy-supportive and practice-oriented scientific research. The ILVO - Social Sciences Unit aims to present and clarify, on a scientific basis, societal choices concerning a sustainable future for Flemish agriculture, fisheries and countryside. Their scientists have expertise in various disciplines including agronomy, sociology, biology, ecology, geography, anthropology and agricultural economics. and their research interests lie in both rural development and agricultural and farm development, and include, a.o., multi-stakeholder processes, farm management, learning processes and sustainability assessment. As such, the Social Science unit is ideally placed to collaborate in TempAg, more specifically the group was responsible for the inventory of sustainability assessment tools within agriculture. This includes an on-going survey assessing sustainability. We collected the information on sustainability approaches including frameworks, tools, standards or others) in countries covered within the brief of the TempAg network (Europe, North America, Oceania, and parts of East Asia, South America and Southern Africa).

About Evelien

Evelien de Olde is a postdoctoral researcher at the Animal Production Systems group at Wageningen University. Her research includes sustainability analysis of livestock production systems, governance of sustainable food systems, transdisciplinary practices and innovative farming concepts. She recently finished her PhD at Aarhus University and Wageningen University, focused on the contribution of farm-level assessment tools to the sustainable development of agriculture. She holds a MSc in Animal Science, and a MSc in Landscape Architecture and Planning, both from Wageningen University. She is currently involved in several international research projects including the H2020 research project Moving Towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security’ (MAGIC) funded by the EU.

About Wageningen University

Wageningen University is the only university in the Netherlands to focus specifically on the theme ‘healthy food and living environment’, and works closely together with governments and the business community. The strength of Wageningen UR lies in its ability to join the forces of specialised research institutes and Wageningen University. It also lies in the combined efforts of the various fields of natural and social sciences. This union of expertise leads to scientific breakthroughs that can quickly be put into practice and be incorporated into education. The Animal Production Systems group uses systems analysis to understand complex livestock systems in order to explore and design a sustainable future. This research group focuses on exploring the consequences of innovations in livestock systems (trade-offs and synergies), with a special focus on the relation between the impact on the environment, the welfare of the animal (including health), and economic viability. Research explores systems at farm, chain, and regional level, both in developed and developing countries. The aim is to develop systems that respect animals and their multiple functions, use resources efficiently, minimize emissions to the environment and are economically viable.