Many environmental issues will affect our food choices over the next few years. These include greenhouse gases associated with production of various foods as well as the carbon costs associated with their processing, packaging, transport and storage. As most people are aware, scarce water resources will also dictate many aspects of food, and soil health will command much more attention.

Australia has a special problem in that our soils are low in phosphorus. World stocks of the phosphate fertilisers we have relied on in the past are running short and are expected to run out within the next 25 to 50 years. Research at the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures warns that phosphorus use and recovery in different forms of agriculture may become our most urgent problem...