Inside ADM’s mission to shift millions of acres to regenerative ag
Ag Funder News
by Jennifer Marston
9h ago
When agrifood giant ADM kickstarted its regenerative agriculture efforts, few outside of organic farming had ever given the phrase much thought. “When we had our first program, it wasn’t even called regenerative agriculture, it was just a cover crop incentive,” Paul Scheetz, director of climate smart ag origination at ADM, tells AgFunderNews. He says ADM’s official regenerative agriculture journey began in 2012 as a kind of “fact-finding mission”; six years later, in 2018, ADM started to officially offer incentives to farmers to transition acreage over to regenerative practices via a pilot pr ..read more
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TRACT’s newly appointed CEO Allison Kopf on the challenge of tracking corporate sustainability
Ag Funder News
by Jennifer Marston
1d ago
Ten years ago, just a handful of agrifood corporates had publicly committed to decarbonizing their supply chain. More have followed since the pandemic first surfaced, but while that list grows, the timeline for reducing emissions and cleaning up supply chains by 2030 is shrinking fast. “For a lot of these public commitments, the time is now to start making real change,” Allison Kopf, newly appointed CEO of sustainability measurement platform TRACT, tells AgFunderNews. “Ten years ago it was just a commitment.” Now, those timelines are coming up, but many corporates still lack adequate data and ..read more
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‘Incremental’ innovation, a warning on the push for profitability and investors ‘scared shitless’ about portfolios: overheard at World Agri-Tech
Ag Funder News
by Elaine Watson
1d ago
Hours after an upbeat conversation on agri-tech investing featuring Vinod Khosla and Dave Friedberg on stage at the World Agri-Tech summit in San Francisco last Tuesday, delegates were brought back down to earth by investors on a later panel who presented a somewhat bleaker view. “We’ve done a particularly poor job getting investors outside of our niche to pay attention. And so we’ve lost that series C through crossover round capital supply,” said Eric O’Brien, cofounder and managing partner at Fall Line Capital, about raising late stage capital in agritech. “Actually, we didn’t lose it ..read more
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Khosla, Friedberg strike positive note amid agrifoodtech funding winter: ‘Exceptional founders have nothing to worry about’
Ag Funder News
by Elaine Watson
1d ago
Vinod Khosla and Dave Friedberg struck a largely positive note on stage at the World Agri-Tech and Future Food-Tech conferences in San Francisco last week despite the ongoing funding winter. While AgFunder reported a 49.2% decline in agrifoodtech funding in 2023 and many startups face the abyss this year without a fresh influx of capital, money is always available for exceptional founders with disruptive products or technologies, insisted Dave Friedberg, CEO at investment group The Production Board (TPB) during a panel debate with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla last Tuesday. “Exceptiona ..read more
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?Vivici CEO on whey from fermentation: “If we narrow the message only to ‘animal-free,’ we’re pigeonholing ourselves”
Ag Funder News
by Elaine Watson
2d ago
Multiple startups are now making dairy proteins with microbes in fermentation tanks instead of cows. But if the marketing and positioning of these ingredients is too narrowly focused on the ‘animal-free’ aspect, says Netherlands-based startup Vivici, it could limit their market potential. “What we see is that customers are looking for better nutrition, better functionality, as well as a greater sustainability footprint,” Stephan van Sint Fiet told AgFunderNews at the Future Food-Tech conference in San Francisco last week. “If we assume that the number one reason to buy these products is to a ..read more
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? Supergut shines in Ozempic era: ‘We’ve tripled the business over the past 5-6 months’
Ag Funder News
by Elaine Watson
2d ago
Is Ozempic “an existential threat to the processed food industry,” as one academic recently told the New York Times, or is it creating new opportunities for food marketers and formulators to create new products or reposition existing ones? One company capitalizing on a surge of consumer interest in natural alternatives to GLP-1 drugs is Supergut (formerly Muniq), a startup making bars and shakes containing a blend of resistant starches and prebiotic fibers that are fermented in the gut to produce short chain fatty acids. These in turn are claimed to stimulate production of appetite ..read more
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From seed varieties to finance access, South-South collaborations are critical to boosting African agriculture
Ag Funder News
by John Njiraini
2d ago
For Africa, a continent where the dream of feeding herself was elusive even before climate change, the future of agriculture is rather uncertain. “There’s a need for Africa to rethink her approach to agriculture,” Ambassador Gurjit Singh, Intellecap board chair, said recently during the 11th Sankalp Africa Summit 2024 held in Nairobi, Kenya.  He added that for African agriculture, the silver lining for the continent lies not in reinventing the wheel but learning from the experiences of other regions, particularly focusing on South-South collaboration. India, for instance, offers vital le ..read more
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More agrifood corporates committing to water stewardship targets
Ag Funder News
by Jennifer Marston
6d ago
Corporate commitments around water stewardship get far less airtime than those for emissions reductions and regenerative agriculture, though in recent years this has started to change. In 2022, water was a prominent item on the COP27 agenda; many agree it’s the next big priority for climate action. Agrifood corporates have a role to play given their global supply chains and the sheer influence many of these brands have on production systems and consumers. Agribusiness worldwide accounts for 70% of the world’s water usage, according to Ceres, in addition to contributing enormously to pollution ..read more
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Meet the founder: FYTO’s Jason Prapas on ‘turning a nitrogen problem into high-grade protein’ for dairy farmers
Ag Funder News
by Elaine Watson
6d ago
[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in FYTO.] Fast-growing aquatic plants such as lemna present an intriguing new sustainable protein source for humans and animals, provided you can find ways to grow and process them cost-effectively, which is easier said than done. But they can also help farmers manage their manure, which can cause major headaches on dairy farms, says FYTO founder Dr. Jason Prapas: “Ultimately we’re turning a nitrogen problem into high-grade protein.” A mechanical engineer who started his career in algae biofuels and learned some hard lessons ab ..read more
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The Week in AgriFoodTech: India’s Jumbotail nets $18m, new investment plans for Corteva, Mondelēz & others
Ag Funder News
by Jennifer Marston
1w ago
It’s a jam-packed week for agrifoodtech with World Agri-Tech wrapping yesterday and Future Food-Tech kicking off today over in San Francisco. Elsewhere in the world, Indian B2B ecommerce startup Jumbotail raised new funds despite a tough market, while multiple agrifood corporates announced new investment initiatives. A Jumbotail fulfillment center. Image credit: JumbotailFoodtech funding India-based Jumbotail nets $18m amid tough B2B ecommerce market Tech in Asia Cauldron raises $6.25m series A to scale continuous fermentation tech AgFunderNews Female-led startup Poseidona raises €1.1M for in ..read more
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