New Food Finance Podcast

Ministers and leaders from around 200 countries gather at global climate talks, this week and next, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
These UN-sponsored talks have been going for 29 years. As emissions continue to rise, and CO2 continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, heating the planet, you may rightly wonder about their role or usefulness. 
But there is no other event on Earth yet to replace them with. 
And at least they spark debate! Which is what we do, in our 18th episode of the New Food Finance. 
This week, I spoke with Serhat Cicekoglu, founder of the venture capital firm Sente Ventures, who is travelling to Baku. 
We discussed, how can a UN process led by ministers and bureaucrats spur innovation at the sharp of end of business, to help us feed a growing population in a world facing climate change, and other serious food system challenges. 
Serhat had a very clear idea of what is needed - short-term measureable targets, that these annual talks can report back on, every 12 months, to see what works and what doesn't. 
He feels 30 or 40-year targets are all very well, but what we actually need is to innovate, experiment and deploy - all as fast as possible! 

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In this episode, I talked with Fotis Fotiadis, founder and CEO of the insect protein manufacturer, Better Origin. The company produces feed for poultry from the larvae of black soldier flies, in its AI-automated shipping containers.
Like the alternative protein space more generally, the insect protein sector has exploded over the last two years, as witnessed by the hundreds of millions of dollars of VC financing for start-up companies, like Better Origin, as a sustainable transition in agriculture rises up the policy, investor and corporate agendas, driven by concern around damage to nature, and climate change.
First of all, I asked Fotis about the driving mission behind Better Origin. The company has just published what he called a white paper on how insects can help transform all organic food waste into useful biomass - “Only humans have created a system that is linear, and takes wasted or surplus food and throws it away. In nature, the whole thing is circular. If we can crack that, the opportunities are absolutely massive. Right now, close to $500 billion, if not more, of value is attributed to wasted product, and that’s what we’re targeting.”
We spoke about the company’s approach today. Better Origin is already carrying out the “bioconversion” of insect larvae into chicken feed, on poultry farms. They turn food waste into usable biomass, in shipping containers, where the larvae bulk up around 5,000-fold in just under two weeks. The poultry farmer can then feed these live larvae on-farm, directly to chickens.
And we talked about the company’s next steps. Better Origin wants to get into the business of processing larvae off-farm, for pet food and aquaculture. This would still follow a distributed approach, via warehouses near sources of food waste, such as supermarkets. These units might each process around 15,000 tonnes of food waste per year.
We talked costs – Fotis acknowledged that insect protein would be more expensive than soya, on a kilo for kilo basis, for years to come, as straight animal feed. But this missed the point, he says, as insect protein would comprise perhaps only 5-10% of the diet, and deliver an overall net financial benefit to the farmer through reduced animal stress, higher productivity, lower mortality and less feed input. Supermarkets get a brand benefit from marketing environmentally friendly eggs, plus less waste.
Regarding land intensity, Fotis estimates that he can produce the same amount of protein on 1sqm as soy would require over 1,500 sqm.
Better Origin’s xmas party was three times bigger this year than last. This breakneck growth is “exciting, but also very difficult to deal with", he says.

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In this fifth episode of my podcast, Agriculture Reinvented, I talk with Ben Goldsmith, investor, environmentalist, enthusiastic re-wilder, and farmer, about his investments, in and outside agriculture, the future of farming, and one of his favourite themes, re-wilding.
Regarding innovation, Ben expects "precision fermentation" to replace a whole bunch of animal protein commodities, such as protein powders which are presently extracted from milk or eggs, for use in processed foods, and that could equally be derived from fermentation, with consumers unable to spot the difference. For Ben, the drivers include not only lower cost, but displacing the “worst, cheapest end of industrial farming”, for example in the U.S. and China.
He is very supportive of the prospects for regenerative agriculture: the precision application of chemicals enabled by a combination of satellite imagery, drones and soil sensors, as well as no-till practices, to boost farm business profit margins and protect the soil.
As a previous DEFRA director, regarding post-Brexit, UK agricultural policy, he thinks that only demonstrated environmental actions can justify continued payments to farmers and other landowners, where he sees the new English Environmental Land Management scheme, ELMs, as a pioneer, likely to be copied globally, including in the EU and U.S., as he thinks “farm support is highly vulnerable, the idea of area-based payments for farmers is a concept that won’t survive”.
Ben is most excited about what he calls farmer-centred re-wilding, and especially the role of native breeds of big grazing cattle, which he calls a silver bullet to revitalise nature, and especially wood pastures, in more remote landscapes, keeping farmers in business, supported by the taxpayer, while increasing jobs in conservation. In the most remote landscapes of all, with local community support, he imagines a whole food chain of native species reintroduced in Scotland and the wilder English uplands and wetlands, from wild ox to beaver and bison to wolves, for a “genuinely wild future”, in million-acre rewilding projects. He sees such farmer-centred re-wilding as a way to maintain farm communities, instead of sheep farming for example, which he says “is not working”.
And he described one new investment fund that he is advising on, to “create new wild places in Britain”, producing “mid-single digit yields” by buying corporate-owned, low productivity land, to generate revenues from biodiversity and carbon offsetting, nature tourism and environmental payments under Britain’s new farm policy.

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In this podcast, I discuss the alternative protein space with Geoff Bryant, Chief Technology Officer at microbe fermentation company, Calysta.
Alternative proteins are all about sourcing protein with less impact on livestock, people and the planet. These alternatives include insect-based protein, plant-based protein, cellular protein made in a lab from animal cells, and microbe-based protein, Calysta’s own speciality.
It was a good time to catch up with Geoff. This week, the company is commissioning its first commercial-scale production unit, at Chongqing in China, a unit it turned on three weeks ago. The unit will produce up to 1,000 kg of biomass per hour, or 700 kg of crude protein, from methane-eating bacteria. Geoff says that level of output will make it the world’s biggest plant microbe fermentation plant. The company is planning to commission a second, similarly sized unit on the same site in China before the end of the year.
Geoff tries to express that protein production in livestock units, by comparing with the crude protein production of a single beef cow, at 50kg per beast. He estimates the two fermentation units will produce up to the equivalent of 14 cows each per hour, or a quarter of a million cows per year together, all on a site the size of a football pitch.
The company’s initial target market is fish farming. Geoff acknowledges cost challenges, versus premium fish meal and soy. But he says cost reductions will come with scale, as well as operational cost reductions, from running their new plant, adding to this with a second fermenting unit.
At the moment, natural gas is the input, half of which, by weight, the company’s bacteria will convert directly into protein. Other inputs include oxygen; a source of nitrogen; metal salts such as potassium and calcium, and acids. They don’t use sugar – important when you consider that this means they aren’t consuming food to produce protein, unlike many conventional meat supply chains today.
We discussed scale issues, given the size of the $1-2 trillion livestock market that alternative protein companies are seeking to address. Even achieving just 10% of that industry would be a massive challenge, requiring a “ridiculous amount of fermentation capacity and number of new industrial plants”, he says, but a worthwhile target.
Geoff is optimistic that bacteria fermentation can tap into the buildout of renewables, where one problem for variable renewables is storage. He hopes that bacteria fermentation can tap into surplus renewables, for example when solar power is un-needed in the middle of the day, to produce renewable methane, and convert this directly into protein for people. “The success of renewable energy will be the success of our food system too."

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This week’s episode is about the U.S. organic agriculture market and industry. In this episode, I talked to Ryan Koory, Vice President of Economics at the U.S. organic agriculture analytics firm, Mercaris.
Organic agriculture is a long-established but minority segment of the global food industry. In this episode I wanted to understand recent market trends, focusing on the U.S. grains and oilseeds market – both compared with conventional markets, and considering market havoc since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – both massive grain producers.
As a non-expert, I found it very interesting to hear how U.S. organic market data infrastructure isn’t there yet, compared with conventional agriculture. For example, the latest official USDA data for organic acreage is 2019/2020. Similarly, trade data are limited to a handful of organic commodities, according to the assignment of trade codes – for example organic corn and organic wheat, but little else.
Next, we talked about prices. It turns out that organic and conventional agricultural commodities are so decoupled that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the price difference between them – ie the organic premium - from a market perspective of drivers. Nevertheless, for sure, there is a big premium. Let’s say for U.S. organic milling wheat, which is selling for $19-24/bushel, versus what appears to be around $8/ bushel for conventional wheat.
Regarding the growth in U.S. organic acreage – Ryan reckoned this is growing, around 3% on average year on year, but there’s more to simply the price difference that is driving that. And there are risks, related to hedging tools, crop insurance and the three-year transition.
Finally, we touched on some more blue-sky issues, first, around the prospect for other sustainable food labels, for example connected with regen agriculture, and second, the place of the organic label in a world increasingly preoccupied with low-carbon production and net zero.
Enjoy!

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In this episode, I talked to Prof Pete Smith, one of the world’s renowned academics on soil carbon sequestration.
In this podcast, Pete gets into the details around soil carbon – what it is, how to measure it, and whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be, as a solution to climate change.
Pete tells us that the science is settled on the agricultural practices that increase soil carbon. But he explains why it’s “not quite there yet”, as an investable asset, and why the big opportunity will be in arable soil, not grasslands. He also explains the big commercial opportunity that he sees for start-up companies trying to crack the biggest “game-changer” problem in soil carbon today – which is how to measure carbon levels in the soil quickly, cheaply, at scale.
Finally, Pete talks us through the benefits of regen agriculture, including practices like min till, cover crops and diverse rotations, explaining why he's in favour of England’s prospective Environmental Land Management scheme.

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In this first episode of my new podcast, Agriculture Reinvented, we explore what digitalisation and big data have to offer agriculture, in conversation with Richard Tiffin, Chief Scientific Officer at the UK agri-food data company, Agrimetrics.
Richard first described in big picture terms what it is that data can bring to farming. So he describes how we can access a whole lot more data than ever before, across whole fields, farms, landscapes, regions and countries, for example using satellite technology. Advances in new analytical methods, such as AI and ML, can then get to work to analyse those data, sift out noise, and help make new advances in understanding.
We then went on to discuss applications in a farm setting. Richard gave the eg of new pressures on farms not able to apply pesticides in a prophylactic way, both because of new consumer sensibilities, and because of worries about pesticide resistance. Big datasets, coupled with AI and ML, can provide an EWS that a wind-borne pest is prevalent in the local landscape, or likely to appear. You can then combine that knowledge with an understanding of soil type, watercourses, legal requirement and weather, for farmers then actively to manage that outbreak, if necessary.
We talked around issues around adoption: Richard described how digitalisation technologies have to make it easy for non-tech-savvy farmers to supply data, almost without realising it. And we discussed briefly the need to attract new, digitally skilled developers into the industry. And we explored whether there were examples of hype in the application of digitalisation and AI, in the field of agriculture, example making excessive claims, say in the field of robotics.
But, before all of that, I asked Richard to explain the core visions that fired up the founding of his company, eight years ago. It turns out there were two “realisations”, as he called them. It turns out Richard was inspired by a desire to avoid a 2008-style financial crisis, in the food system, and a need to overcome fragmentation in the food sector, to speed up adoption of digital technologies.

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