The world’s food and agricultural systems are truly impressive. The complex networks from production to consumers use advanced technologies to supply safe and affordable food. Now it must prepare for a changing climate and other challenges to sustainably meet future needs of growing populations with limited natural resources.

This forum will review characteristics and challenges of existing systems and the need for various engineering disciplines to converge to lead the transformation of current mostly linear food and agriculture into circular and resilient systems. The forum will also explore needed progress and investment in education, R&D, modeling and analytics, public-private collaboration, and other dimensions. Specific goals are to:

1. Inspire diverse engineering disciplines to converge and lead the needed transformations of food and agricultural systems
2. Explore ways to analyze trade-offs for the transformed systems and develop standards
3. Identify needed investments for transitioning from linear to unified circular food and agricultural systems