The Centre for Synthetic Biology and the Bioeconomy (CSBB) brings together a far-reaching multidisciplinary community across all Newcastle University's faculties - Medical Sciences, Science, Agriculture and Engineering, and Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. The CSBB focuses on many different areas of Synthetic Biology, including bioprocessing, computational design and in vivo computation, a...

This article takes on the cultural politics of “if they only knew” as it relates to alternative food practice. It draws on surveys and interviews of managers of two kinds of alternative food institutions—farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture—to illustrate the color-blind mentalities and universalizing impulses of alternative food discourse. The ways in which these discourses inst...

We argue that the World Wide Web, network communities, and computer-supported cooperative work have transformed the context for community networks, occasioning a reconstruction of the concept. We analyze features of proximate communities and use these as a basis for examining the design rationale for current implementations of community networks. In particular, we highlight multiple roles and r...

The recent intensification of the arable landscape by modern agriculture has had negative effects on biodiversity. Organic farming has been introduced to mitigate negative effects, but is organic farming beneficial to biodiversity? In this review, we summarize recent research on the effects of organic farming on arable biodiversity of plants, arthropods, soil biota, birds, and mammals. The ecos...

Smallholder farming systems form unique ecosystems that can protect beneficial soil biota and form an important source of useful genetic resources. They are characterized by high level of agricultural diversity mainly focused on meeting farmers' needs. Unfortunately, these systems often experience poor crop production mainly associated with poor planning and resource scarcity. Soil fertility is...

Rural, regional and remote (R-3) communities are generally in decline in Australia and in some other countries in the Western world. The economic problems include a decline in agriculture as competitive countries protect their domestic industry by subsidies and high tariffs. This paper examines the economic situation of these communities on four levels. These are the policy level (the Australia...