Kirsty Black, Iain Stirling and Pete Ianetta share their views on the development of Nàdar and why it is a good example of innovation with the potential to transform the food system.

Created by Arbikie’s Master Distiller, Kirsty Black,  in collaboration with Abertay University, and the James Hutton Institute, each 700ml bottle of Nàdar has a carbon footprint of -1.54 kg CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent), meaning it avoids more carbon dioxide emissions than it creates.

In a series of videos, Nàdar 's  creators discuss the origins of Nàdar based on sustainable agriculture principles, the research conducted, and the virtuous circles that can reconnect consumers, producers and research.

"...bringing in all this expertise can demonstrate to other people in the industry to think a bit differently and that there are other options out there."-Kirsty Black

"I think it is incremental improvements and you just move the whole industry forward" -Iain Stirling

"It is pretty unusual to see research, especially in such a short space of time, go from lab, small plot scale studies, to full scale promotion and global distribution."-Pete Iannetta

The World'First Climate Positive Gin (video)

Abertay Press Release

How Pea Gin Could Help Reduce Your Environmental Impact (students film video project)

In a recent episode of the podcast Plant Breeding Stories, TRUE coordinator Dr. Pete Iannetta shared how research on legume production and processing led to working on producing a carbon-neutral Scottish gin, Nadar.  He also discussed his quest to breed out nitrogen fixation in legume crops and talks about how his broad life experiences and background in ecology gives him a systems perspective on the the connections between social sciences, economics and agriculture.

Pete Iannetta also gave a talk online on 8 March 2021 for SEDA ( Scottish Ecological Design Association) on ‘Soil and growth”

https://www.seda.uk.net/soil-and-growth

The (legume) presentation is from minute 10:55 to 32:30

Last year in Workpackage 7 we launched a so-called Delphi survey to explore potential future policy scenarios for legumes in Europe. Delphi is a structured and sequential method used to elicit expert opinion on a specific question allowing space for feedback and dialogue among the participants. We run our Delphi study in two consecutive rounds, the first one aiming to understand which factors contribute to the relatively low production and consumption of legumes in Europe, and the second one discovering which policy actions in the future could make legumes a more prominent component of the value chain.

The first Delphi round found that the major reason for the relatively low level of production and consumption of legumes in Europe is a “system lock-in”. This means that at both the production and the consumption side there are major barriers which limit the uptake of legumes and result in a hen and eggs problem: production is low because legumes are not competitive enough (compared to other crops) due to lack of demand, but at the same time consumption is low because legumes are not attractive enough (compared to meat and other food products) due to lack of innovative products.

Based on the problem framing and the potential policy interventions emerging from the first round, we asked participating experts in the second round to rank and discuss seven policy scenarios in terms of their impact on legume production and consumption, as well as their contribution to a sustainability transition.

Results suggest that policies encouraging the reduced use of inorganic N fertilizer can increase the cultivation of legumes. Investment in R&D, agricultural extension services, and knowledge transfer is necessary to support the production side and to allow for a smooth transition from high use of synthetic N fertilizer in conventional agriculture to precision farming and agroecological farming. Mitigation and adaptation strategies to combat climate change can have an indirect positive effect on legume production and consumption if these policies are implemented on large-scale and effectively. Policies that tackle nutrition, health and diet are relevant for the increase of legume consumption and indirectly, legume production. However, preferences, culinary traditions, and cultural habits are difficult to change with top-down approaches. Citizen led initiatives that inform and educate the public on the environmental and health benefits of legume consumption should accompany policies that tackle production and farming strategies (i.e. Greening payments, with other agroecological and rural development incentives, etc.).

The CAP was considered an important tool to support food production and protection of the natural environment. The Green Deal in general, and the Farm to Fork Strategy in particular, represent a substantial policy innovation that may positively impact legume production and consumption in the EU. However, the question remains: will the strategy be well implemented in the various member states and how will the barriers and system lock-ins be overcome across the different national contexts?

Hi everyone, I would like to share some of the actions Eurest Portugal is developing this month dedicated to legumes.

It is as great joy that we communicate to you the new certification of Eurest Portugal, in the Sustainability area with our projetc Choose Beans. Eurest Portugal, classifies all its sustainability projects within the Sustainable Development Goals | SDGs, as reported in our latest Sustainability Report.

But because we aim our work within transparency and look also for external recognition, we decided with this motto for our actions, to move forward for external certification of the Choose Beans project, which aims to promote a more sustainable diet with our customers, consumers and society in general. We share with you the Bureau Veritas Certificate, we are all very proud of our Choose Beans | True Team and project. https://www.eurest.pt/a-nossa-historia/#Certifica%C3%A7%C3%A3o

Our entire February Newsletter (for now it is just available in PT but we are working in as EN version) is dedicated to legumes, and includes

• the Celebration of World Pulse Day
• updates about our Choose Beans Campaigns within the TRUE project
• the reasons for choosing legumes
• instructions how to soak dried legumes in order to preserve their nutritional qualities
• recipes and typical carnival dishes such as Feijoada à Brasileira with black beans
• a section all dedicated to the younger ones (with games, recipes, stories and coloring images)
• We also take the opportunity to promote the European Legumes In Transition | Webinar. 

Read the Newsletter online: https://www.eurest.pt/dia-mundial-das-leguminosas/

Easy peasy legume recipes for kids across the globe – introducing kids to legume cooking

As part of a student project for WP3: Nutrition and product development at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, a children's cookbook with legume recipes was created by former Erasmus student and current TRUE student assistant Eva Lingemann. 

In a colourful design, the book presents various recipes all featuring at least one legume variety. Recipes are linked to the three pedoclimatic zones ‘Atlantic’, ‘Continental’ and ‘Mediterranean’, distinguished by the colour scheme. Little legume characters, drawn by Styliani Siomou, lead children and their parents through the book, taking them on a journey around the globe. They do not only provide general information on legumes, cooking and storing processes but also background stories, "Did you know"- facts and tips on the preparation.

Parents can use the book to introduce their youngsters to healthy, sustainable and tasty cooking. Kids can carry out easy tasks during the cooking process while experiencing the joy of preparing a meal from scratch. 

This book is a means of familiarizing consumers with the diversity and child friendliness of legumes and legume dishes.

Many more legume recipes can be found in the TRUE recipe section.

It is not so long ago that we met in person to exchange knowledge about the topic of food waste by chopping and tasting food together. In the last six months we were confronted with completely new challenges due to Corona. It necessarily opened up paths into a digital world that were previously unknown to us. Never before had we used the internet as extensively as since the Corona Pandemic.

Thus, in April 2020, the World Disco Soup Day took place online for the first time. Slow Food uses this action day to draw attention to crooked and therefore often wasted vegetables and prepares them into simple and delicious dishes. Once again, people gave deep insights into their cooking pots full of food, which we pay less attention to because of supposed visual defects. There was good music for dancing and interesting facts about food processing and artisanal foods. All in all, a very successful event, which Slow Food has already carried forward in the digital world.

For example, Slow Food created a 'Legume Edition' as part of the accompanying program of the 4th General Assembly of the TRUE project: cooking, dancing and sharing recipes about legumes together. This fits in very well, as Slow Food's mission in the TRUE project is to collect and publish European legume recipes.

The TRUE project partners actually wanted to meet in Stuttgart at the University of Hohenheim. Since this was unfortunately not possible due to Covid-19, the organizers successfully moved the meeting to a productive, fruitful online format using a zoom and miro-board including an evening program in the kitchen, living room and pub.

The virtual kitchen was the stage for Slow Food's Disco Soup. Participants cooked legumes together, exchanged memories, knowledge and recipes. Many of them did not know in advance what was going to be served. They knew the main actor, their legume, but other ingredients were improvised, true to the motto "let's see what else is in my fridge". A clear statement against food waste and for the appreciation of all foods, no matter shape and size.

The participants were creative and courageous, trying out new ways of combining food. The evening was hosted by Elisabeth Berlinghof, who discovered her love of colorful, shapely crops at the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy, and who promotes legumes at every opportunity. She asked the participants about their childhood memories of legumes. These will not be revealed here; instead, we invite you to ask yourselves what your own memories are. You are welcome to send them to cookbook@slowfood.de and, by publishing them on Slow Food and TRUE, help to make more people curious about legumes again. We also encourage everyone to keep their eyes open for more online offers - we'd be happy to work with you. Because even if we are only together digitally, we can create closeness and common ground, provide culinary insights and connect people across national borders.

As part of the field trip during the 2nd TRUE LIN Workshop which took place in Porto, all TRUE members were invited to a show cooking event at "Mercado de Bolhão".

Surrounded by traders presenting Portuguese traditional foods, TRUE members enjoyed chief Antonio's cooking show and the delicacies he and his team presented. With all food being nicely served and presented, as well as accompanied by a glass of cooled white wine, one could easily forget being seated on the centre of a busy market place.

To start with Antonio and his team suprised his audience with "Peixinhos da horta" (Portuguese: Little fish from the farm), which turned out to be fully vegetarian with the "fish" being based on green beans. The following main  "Thousand colour bean stew" kept what it promised and attested to the variability of legumes once again. The meal was rounded off by another special legume treat:  a traditional Portuguese Bean Tart. 

See below for the according recipes and click here to find more delicious legume dishes.

As part of the interactive webinar "Let's talk cattle and sheep", aiming at cattle and sheep farmers, James Humphreys gave recommendations on how to optimise the benefits of clover in grassland based on the findings of Case Study 2.  

Leguminous living mulches have been shown to support a broad range of positive effects on biotic and abiotic indicators in broad-acre arable production, including soil health. With their nitrogen-fixing potential, they can also play a role in achieving sustainability goals and targets – for example, by naturally fixing nitrogen into the soil, they can help reduce dependence on artificial nitrogen fertiliser inputs, which in turn can reduce nitrous oxide emissions. Key to achieving such benefits, however, is good management of the clover living mulch, with challenges to achieving this remaining a barrier to uptake within industry.

The management of clover to minimise competition with the cash crop during the growing season is one such challenge. Where this is not appropriately addressed early in the growing season, lover living mulches can rapidly close in on the cash crop, especially where the clover has been previously established. This can lead to reduced establishment rates and, by the end of the growing season, crop yield.

The TRUE Case Study at STC aims to evaluate management options of in-crop clover living mulches. As part of this work, we have under-sown cereal, maize and sugar beet crops with berseem, red and white clovers, using PAT-assisted strip tillage technology to try to overcome early emergence and establishment challenges. The strip till worked the clover seeds, previously broadcast on the soil surface, to a depth at which they would not successfully emerge. Though not fully analysed, preliminary findings suggest that, by allowing the crop a strip with reduced clover coverage at drilling, final yield of the crop was not affected, supporting successful establishment and early growth.   

As part of this work, we have also been working in partnership with Manterra Ltd to investigate machinery solutions that can address challenges raised by management of in-crop clover living mulches throughout a growing season. The aim of this is to investigate whether mowing of clover strips in strip tilled clover living mulch platforms can help manage and mitigate the effect of clover later in the growing season as the crop develops, by ‘knocking it back’. Mowing is already an approach we have previously used in our perennial clover living mulch platforms prior to strip tillage and drilling. It generates organic matter that gets worked into the soil during strip tillage, and by the increased number of worms we have observed in clover plots. We are looking forward to seeing the role that mowing might play throughout the growing season – watch this space!

As a contribution to the virtual Arable Scotland Event on July 2, TRUE Project Coordinator Pete Iannetta gave two presentations about legumes' central role in crop rotation and legume agronomy. 

https://www.arablescotland.org.uk/programme

Dan Clavin gave a presentation on the Case Study 2 findings about using clover in grassland at the virtual "Smart Farming Spring Seminar 2020" on April 30th 2020 for the Irish Farmers Association (72,000 members):

https://smartfarming.ie/

The world’s first “climate positive” gin has been created by UK scientists — using the humble garden pea.

Five years of research at Abertay University and the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, in collaboration with Arbikie Distillery, has culminated in the release of new gin, Nàdar.

Created by Arbikie’s Master Distiller, PhD student Kirsty Black, each 700ml bottle of Nàdar has a carbon footprint of -1.54 kg CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent), meaning it avoids more carbon dioxide emissions than it creates.

This environmental performance — significantly better than traditional wheat gins — is mainly achieved by utilising all useful components of the peas from the dehulling (de-skinning) and distilling process, to create home-grown animal feed.

Read more:

To view the PhD research paper:

Just the tonic! Legume biorefining for alcohol has the potential to reduce Europe's protein deficit and mitigate climate change

The Public Institution for the Development of the Međimurje County REDEA organised a first Legume Innovation Network (LIN) workshop that was held on November 29th 2019. The call for participation in a Croatian Legume Innovation Network was released in 2017. This workshop was organised mainly for members of the Croatian LIN working group that applied, but there was also other producers of bean, soy and peas.

For a more dynamic workshop we invited some other stakeholders involved in the legume value chain. We invited external experts that represent producers, suppliers and processors.

The workshop was divided in two parts. In the first part of the workshop, leading firms from Croatia in legume production/processing gave their presentations. Due to that, representatives from Podravka d.d., TSH d.d., RWA Croatia Ltd. and Vitalis Crop Care Ltd. informed participants about their innovations on the market and their approach to support production and processing of legumes. As we finished our Case Study, our subcontractor, SEEDEV Croatia Ltd. gave an overview of the results.

In the second part of our workshop, we divided our participants in two working groups where we tried to put out the main Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of Croatian legume value chains from the production and market point of view.

To raise more awereness and to present the TRUE project, we organised a competition in cooking beans. The main dish was military beans (a dish with beans, sausages, spices and vegetables, that soldiers cooked for themselves in the army), since our offices are situated in a former military complex, which is now transformed into the Centre of Knowledge of Međimurje County.

The competition was held parallel to the workshop, so after the working part, everybody joined outside for lunch.  The competition with five teams was big success, because we reach more than 250 people before even the news got published.

Well-managed leguminous living mulches have been shown to provide ‘multifunctional’ biotic and abiotic benefits in broad-acre arable production, with many positive impacts on soil health, crop protection, weed suppression and biodiversity. Several key management challenges remain to be overcome in order to optimise living mulch systems and increase uptake within industry.

One such key challenge in the management of clover living mulches is the achievement of good establishment of the chosen clover type to under-sow with the crop, and subsequent persistence of the clover into future growing seasons. This can be maximised with considered selection of the clover type, as different types have varying characteristics and requirements which may affect not only ease of establishment, but also whether the living mulch can be expected to last long-term given climactic conditions. These are important aspects which, in turn, can also feed into weed management strategies.

As part of the TRUE Case Study at STC, which aims to evaluate management options of in-crop clover living mulches, white, red and berseem clover living mulches were under-sown in a fodder maize crop in the 2018 growing season. Despite dry, challenging weather conditions, the clovers established readily, most likely aided by shading effects from the maize crop which may have protected the soil from rapid drying, thus improving conditions for establishing clover seedlings.

In the 2019 growing season, the same area was sown with sugar beet using strip-tillage and precision agriculture techniques, with an aim to evaluate the recovery of the clover sown in the previous season. The 2019 spring, however, was warm and dry, leading to a slow start for the clover following drilling of the sugar beet. Through the subsequent season, the red and white clover plots did recover somewhat, though this was significantly patchy with poor overall ground coverage levels. This, combined with a summer punctuated by good rainfall and warm weather spells, led to poor weed suppression and consequently to challenges in managing the weed pressure in the crop. Data has not yet been analysed, but initial observations suggest that top-up sowings of clover after the first growing season may be of benefit to maximise clover coverage across growing seasons, thus reducing the likelihood of significant weed challenges and potentially mitigating the vagaries of the weather!