Expertise
Subjects I know from the field and the literature.
My work focuses on food security, agriculture and sustainable food systems, drawing on research training at The University of Edinburgh and five years of fieldwork with smallholder farmers in Kenya. I examine the evidence behind agricultural and nutrition recommendations, set out what studies can and cannot show, and connect the findings to the decisions facing farmers, communities and policymakers.
My aim is to make complex research clear and useful without stripping out its uncertainty or context.
How food is actually produced, by whom, under what constraints, and why recommendations that look sound on a research station fail on a two-hectare farm. This is the subject I know from both ends, having run the trials and then synthesised the literature that trials like mine feed into.
- Soil fertility, nutrient management and fertiliser policy
- Smallholder systems, extension and technology adoption
- Cropping system design, intercropping and rotation
- Yield gaps and the economics of agricultural inputs
Where this comes from
Five years as a research and development officer, senior agronomist and extension officer in Kenya, running factorial field trials on cover crops and nitrogen rate and advising 1,000+ out-grower farmers.
Sustainability claims go wrong when they report a benefit without its trade-off. Nitrogen-fixing legumes reduce fertiliser demand and also compete with the cereal beside them. Cover crops build soil and also cost a season of land. Both sides of the ledger matter.
- Biological nitrogen fixation and fertiliser substitution
- Cover cropping, residue management and soil carbon
- Land use efficiency and the land equivalent ratio
- Climate adaptation in rain-fed smallholder systems
Where this comes from
Designed and ran a two-by-three factorial trial testing lablab and mucuna cover crops against three nitrogen rates on two soil types, and later synthesised the sub-Saharan intercropping literature for a master's meta-analysis.
The link between what a food system produces and what a population can actually eat is where my agricultural training and my food security training meet. I approach diet quality and micronutrient adequacy as questions about supply, price and access, not only about individual choice.
- Micronutrient adequacy and dietary diversity
- Food environments, affordability and access
- Nutrition-sensitive agriculture and biofortification
- Reading nutritional epidemiology honestly, including its limits
Where this comes from
MSc Food Security at The University of Edinburgh, covering nutrition, food policy, vulnerability assessment and quantitative methods.
This is the underlying skill: taking a contested question and a body of literature, working out what the literature supports, how confident that conclusion is and where it falls apart, and then explaining it for whoever needs to use it.
- Systematic search, screening and PRISMA reporting
- Meta-analysis and meta-regression in R
- Heterogeneity, sensitivity analysis and publication bias
- Turning a technical result into a paragraph a non-specialist can use
Where this comes from
Master's meta-analysis of 69 studies and 640 intercrop-versus-sole-crop comparisons, fitting multilevel random-effects models on log response ratios in R with the metafor package.