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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

agriculture

Supplant is Expanding its Fiber-Based Sugar Throughout the US Following $18M Raise

Americans have a problem: we consume way too much sugar (about 57 pounds a year on average) and not nearly enough fiber (only about 5 percent of the population ingests enough). The Supplant Company aims to offer a solution to this issue with its sugar made from the fibers of agricultural side streams like corn, wheat, and rice.

At the start of this week, The Supplant Company announced that it has raised a $18 million Series A funding round. Celebrity investors like Ayesha Curry (actress) and Chris Paul (Basketball player) joined this round, along with Manta Ray, EQT, Khosla, Felicis, Coatue, Y Combinator, Agfunder, and more. This brings the company’s total funding to $27 million.

I spoke with Dr. Tom Simmons, the CEO and founder of The Supplant Company, earlier this week to discuss the latest funding round and what the next steps will be for the company. When asked what the next year will look like for the company, Simmons said the “…we’re really sort of focused on driving further rollouts of the product, so more products, and more places more consumers having them. And of course the scale-up size. There’s a whole load of technical work going on behind the scenes by all the scientists to ramp up production and use different feedstocks as well.”

The Supplant Company launched in the U.S. in June 2021 in partnership with Chef Thomas Keller and his restaurants in California and New York. The company’s sugar is currently still being used in the dessert dishes at these restaurant locations. Now, Supplant’s sugar is being used at You’re a Cookie (Illinois), Cookie Fix (Alabama), Sweet Republic (Arizona), Bakeology (California), and RiverSea (Virginia).

The Supplant Company is both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), although it has primarily focused on business partnerships since its launch. I asked Simmons when I could buy a bag of Supplant’s sugar in say, my local Whole Foods, and he said, “We’re not planning to sell sugar anytime soon directly to consumers, maybe at some point in the future. We don’t think it’s where the big business opportunity nor the big social opportunity is.” Americans consume a shocking average of 71 grams of sugar per day, and Simmons sees most of this sugar consumption mostly stemming from foods, like cookies, cake, ice cream, and other sweets, that the consumers purchase outside of the home.

A few other companies in the food tech space are attempting to tackle the issue of individuals consuming too much added sugars. DouxMatok uses sugar reduction technology for its Incredo Sugar product, and launched its sugar-reduced products in April of this year. Better Juice uses enzymatic technology to reduce the amount of sugar in natural juices. Siggi’s, a company known for its Icelandic skyr cultured dairy products, released what it called a “Palate Training Kit” to help consumers reduce their sugar intake.

As The Supplant Company continues to rollout its sugar in the U.S., it will also work on developing new products. Simmons mentioned that the company will release new products in the not-so-distant future, including some that are not sugar.

Update: This article previously stated that The Supplant Company had raised $25 million USD in its most recent funding round, but the correct amount it has been updated to reflect is $18 million.

Paul Lightfoot of BrightFarms Discusses the Trajectory of Carbon-Neutral Foods

In 2011, Paul Lightfoot founded BrightFarms, an indoor hydroponic farm for growing leafy greens. BrightFarms is alive and well, and this past August, the company was acquired by one of its investors, Cox Enterprises. I had the opportunity to catch up with the serial entrepreneur to discuss his latest passion and project: advocating for carbon-neutral foods in his newsletter, called “Negative Foods Newsletter“. Here is our conversation:

The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity

Ashlen: Do you want to start by discussing what you’ve been working on and what your newsletter is about?

Paul: The thesis for the newsletter, and for my future book, is that the food system is responsible for, depending on who you ask, about a third of global greenhouse gases. Food, however, is unique. It’s unique in the sense that we all have to eat constantly to survive, but it’s also unique that food can be grown regeneratively, crops can be grown in a way that doesn’t release carbon into the atmosphere, and can actually draw carbon down out of the atmosphere. So if, as a society, we continue to make changes so that we eat food that draws carbon on a net basis, the food system can actually be a lever to reverse climate change. Food is sort of different, and I would say it’s better than energy let’s say, or transportation. You can eliminate your emissions with energy, with things like wind or solar or hydro, but it doesn’t actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere and that’s what is sort of magical about food, that it can, I think, can be a lever to go backward on climate change. So that’s what I’m working on and that’s what I’m excited about.

Ashlen: Could you briefly describe the process of what it might look like to go carbon neutral? I know that’s going to look different for a lot of different crops and companies.

Paul: I’m going to answer your question two ways. The first part is, with respect to a particular category of food, and the second is with respect to society, our society in America, I’ll use, beef as an example, and I like to make this example because it’s pretty well studied and well known and because the stakes are so high. So industrial meat, in my opinion, although it’s, I would say it’s a fact, it’s true, but industrial meat is the worst actor in terms of climate in our food system.

It’s grown in a way, typically that releases incredible amounts of greenhouse gases. Part of it is that we’re generally feeding grains like corn and soy, to our cattle, and the fertilizer for those, those grains are generally made from natural gas. And often, a lot of those grains are grown in places that used to be carbon sinks and the worst parts of those stories are like the Amazon rainforest that’s burned down to grow corn and soy for cows in the United States.

It’s a disaster, not only did we burn down 1000s of years of stored carbon, but every year there’s not more carbon stored in that case. The cattle themselves, of course, release methane, because they’re eating the wrong food. And so you’ve got those three reasons why there’s an enormous amount of greenhouse gases released with industrial beef. 

Now, on the other hand, there’s beef that can be grown regeneratively and people might think of words like grass-fed. This is truly having pastures, and a low enough density of animals per space and pastures, that the grass itself is the product, and the beef is sort of a byproduct. The grass itself is grown naturally in a way that on a net basis results in more carbon being taken from the atmosphere than released. So, if people convert their beef, eating away from distribution toward regenerative beef, they’re actually making climate change, better. 

It’d be fine if you got rid of all beef compared to industrial beef as well but you can actually become a lever for good. 

So that’s one example, and we could give examples for perennials, like olives and lots of different ways as well, and even examples in row crops like wheat, but I’ll move on now to think about how do we do this as a society, right. And, I think that consumers will be a big part of what changes things and I’m pretty optimistic. I think that when consumers have more understanding of the carbon footprints of their food choices, they will make choices, such that foods with a lower carbon footprint, which will have a competitive advantage. 

I say this based on recognizing that over the last 20 years, consumer demand for organic skyrocketed. People paid more and people bought more organic foods, even though there wasn’t really clear data that organic was better for the environment, or for your health. And that gives me confidence that when they understand foods are better carbon footprints, they’ll be willing to pay more and choose those foods. I think when that happens, when consumers start choosing foods that are carbon negative or carbon-neutral, you’ll see this massive shift in consumer demand, and then you’ll have farms and food companies racing to meet that demand and that’ll result in changing the practices to more regenerative practices.

 So I’m excited about that. The one thing that’s missing, by the way, is that knowledge for consumers, I do think we need to get a paradigm in a place where there’s some standardization, about what labels being what and where you can give consumers knowledge about their foods carbon footprints.

Ashlen: I think you make such a good point about the organic movement. I was in Whole Foods actually the other day and I saw a box of cereal that said it was made with regenerative grains, and thought whoa, I have not seen that yet.  

Paul: That’s interesting, I wonder what brand it was. Maybe General Mills. It’s such early days for that, and if you stop 100 People walking through that aisle in Whole Foods, I think 90 of them won’t really understand what your regenerative is, which is part of the challenge today. I think there’s a risk that if we don’t define it, it could get sort of watered down in a way like the word “natural” is now, which would be a real shame. But it’s great to see that big food companies are not in, you know, in my pattern recognition famous for innovation, or for cannibalizing their existing portfolios of brands, but there have been some massive investments and announcements made by big food companies. Maybe my favorite is that Unilever intends to roll out carbon labeling voluntarily, pretty soon on 1000s and 1000s of products. I’m hoping that is the rest of the industry.

Ashlen: Many companies are making claims and pledges to go carbon neutral. What should look for, and should we trust all of them? How do we avoid greenwashing as consumers? 

Paul: I don’t judge companies or people by their motives, so I don’t think to myself, this company is bad because of what they’ve done in the past, I judge them by their actions. I do think that there are good people working at Unilever and General Mills that want to do the right thing. It’s hard to change big companies. It’s hard to cannibalize your revenue stream, it’s hard to innovate. PepsiCo was, I remember famously, would say, we’re making our food so much healthier, “Look at the reduced calories” when they were just changing the unit sizes and their products. That’s one of these cases where I think that’s B.S. that’s not making food healthier. 

So I do think we need to worry. I do think that the consumer demand for regenerative food and carbon-friendly food is so strong, that there will almost certainly be claims made that don’t bear out. So I think we should judge people less than what they say and what they’ve done in the past and more on what they do. I’m pushing the world to get good labeling and pushing the world to get good definitions and standardization. In the meantime, we probably have to be a little bit circumspect and really analyze what companies are doing and say.

Ashlen: Are there certain foods and beverages that are easier to make carbon-neutral? I’m thinking along the lines are animal-based products more difficult to make carbon-neutral than say cereal or something.

Paul: Yeah. Oh, such an interesting question. I think the starting point by the way is that eating whole and unprocessed plants is almost certainly way better on a Planet basis. Right, so the carrot is not screaming for attention on the shelf, but if you’re eating a carrot, that was, you know produced thoughtfully, especially if it was produced without synthetic fertilizers which generally would be if it was organic. You likely have a very small carbon footprint, certainly, relative to processed food like cereals or relative to meat that’s grown in CAFOs, or in any sort of an industrial system. 

There are some rules of thumb that you can follow, you can go back to Michael Pollan’s old “how to eat” phrase, which is “eat real food, mostly plants, and not too much”, that probably goes a long way and of course, when he said food he was implying that it was real food and not processed. With that being said, this is a nuanced topic. Like I said with beef, it can be produced in a way that’s climate positive, what I would call it negative food. It’s just not what you generally find in supermarkets today, so it’s unfortunately, a little bit complex for consumers right now.

Ashlen: As you said, this is still very new, we’re still figuring out a lot and it’s exciting to see it unfold. 

Paul: It’s new, but it’s pretty urgent, so I feel like there’s a little bit of a race on, and we got to get people thinking about it, talking about it more. 

Okay, so I’m thinking of a Pennsylvania grocer called Giant, it’s like the supermarket in Pennsylvania, they have a big push for regenerative sourcing. I hope that retailers have an important role to play in this. I think we all need to be out there, getting people to understand this, and holding them accountable for any greenwashing as well.

Ashlen: Do you want to just briefly discuss some brands and companies that you like to support? 

Paul: I’d love to. Yeah. So, one that I just learned about was at the regenerative food systems, investment forum in Oakland last week, which was fun, and there was a beer brand at a cocktail party from Patagonia Provisions, Patagonia’s food investment group. Basically, they’re sourcing the main ingredients like wheat that were grown regeneratively to get a regenerative beer. And I thought that’s awesome. I don’t know that I can buy it here in New York yet but I’m going to have someone, you know, drive a truck across the country for me so that’s one of my favorites. 

There’s a beef company near Asheville North Carolina called hickory nut gap. And that’s a multi-generation family-owned business that buys regenerative animal products from farms that are following certain practices, run by a guy I trust and with a good brand and I think that’s an example of one of my favorites.

I do like the olive oil story, that’s Corto, that is the company that I covered in my newsletter. I actually made one of my kids a fried egg, in their olive oil this morning. Maybe another company is not a food brand itself but it is sort of a platform is in Northern Virginia. There’s a company called for 4P Foods, and it’s this digital platform that’s connecting the buyers that care about this stuff so the universities, the corporate campuses, the school districts that have these mandates to source regenerative food, and it’s connecting them with the farmers that are growing regenerative food because those farmers are having a hard time getting through the bigger national distribution networks. And so far 4P Foods is creating a new network essentially because there’s demand out there, and they’re bringing the farms to these buyers. It’s not just online, they have warehouses and trucks so they’re really trying to be everything. And I think that’s a pretty exciting business as well.

Scientists Discover How to Manipulate Plants’ Response to Light for Food Growth

What if you could turn a plant’s genes on and off depending on changes in light and temperature? A group of scientists from UC Riverside has done just that in a recent study that could have important implications for farmers in an era of rapid and unpredictable climate change (reported on by UC Riverside News).

Plants need light to develop and grow, and the protein found in plants that detects light is called phytochrome B. This particular protein changes the expression of genomes and alters plant growth based on light information received. Additionally, phytochrome B can control the activity of a group of proteins called PIFs. If the activity of the PIF proteins are reduced, this could lead to the plant’s stem slowing in growth.

According to the researchers, this discovery can assist in increasing food production and crop yields. When plants are too close together in a field, they compete for light. Shorter plants that end up in the shade of other plants exert extra energy to grow their stems taller than their neighbors. This extra energy is taken away from growing the “food part” of the plant, like the seeds, leave, or fruit.

The scientists, led by UCR botany professor Meng Chen, reduced the activity of the PIF proteins and reduced the stem growth. In turn, they discovered that plants with shorter stems can free up energy for the more desirable edible portions to grow more rapidly and robustly. They also found that manipulating a plant’s response to light can allow plants to be grown closer together and in the shade.

With the human population rapidly approaching 8 billion and expected to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, finding alternative solutions to growing high crop yields is prudent. Indoor farming, as companies like CropOne, AeroFarms, and BrightFarms practice, allow for a fully controlled environment and can result in consistent crop yields. A company called InnerPlant edits plant DNA to turn the plant into a living sensor to mitigate crop loss.

Climate change is expected to affect growing seasons and the ability to grow certain crops worldwide. However, studies like this give hope that one day crops will better adapt to fluctuations in light and temperature, making them viable in a rapidly changing environment.

Red Sea Farms is Growing Crops in Saltwater

Earth’s oceans are good for a lot of things. They generate more than half of the oxygen we need to breathe, regulate our climates and provide us with a bounty of fish for sustenance. One thing the ocean’s salty water is not so good at? Watering crops. At least it wasn’t. Startup Red Sea Farms is developing a new technology that uses saltwater to not only irrigate crops, but also help cool growing facilities in an energy efficient manner.

Based in Saudi Arabia, Red Sea Farms is affiliated with King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST). I spoke with Prof. Mark Tester, Co-Founder and CSO of Red Sea Farms, by video chat this week, and while he was pretty tight lipped about exactly how his company’s technology works, he did share the basic ideas.

In a nutshell, Red Sea Farms is able to either irrigate land crops with saltwater or grow crops hydroponically using a mixture of 90 percent saltwater and 10 percent fresh water. Right now the company is growing tomatoes through a combination of plant selection, breeding and grafting (but not genetically modifying) in such a way that developed root stocks that can grow in saltwater.

The obvious importance of this technology is that areas of the world that are now inhospitable to agriculture because of fresh water access, arable land and temperature could someday produce their own crops with the abundant (and free) sea water.

To be clear, Red Sea Farms isn’t growing tomatoes in the sea. Rather, it is bringing in sea water to either irrigate fields or into a greenhouse facility it has set up in Saudi Arabia. But that saltwater isn’t just growing the tomato plants. Red Sea Farms has also developed a way to use saltwater in its evaporative cooling system. This, plus the use of transparent solar panels at its greenhouses could be used by other growing facilities to reduce their carbon and freshwater footprints when producing food.

Red Sea Farms is already selling tomatoes and cherry tomatoes at markets in Saudi Arabia. As Tester explained, tomatoes grown in saltwater are actually sweeter than normal tomatoes because the plants produce extra sugar to overcome the salt. Additionally, the tomatoes have a slightly thicker skin, which gives them a little extra crunch and extends their shelf life.

While Red Sea Farms currently makes food, it’s an agritech company with a longer term goal to fully develop and productize its technology for licensing out to third parties.

Precision AI Raises $20M Seed Round for Drone-Powered Surgical Herbicide Application

Precision AI, an automated precision agriculture startup, announced today that it has raised a $20 million in Seed round of equity and grant funding. The round was co-led by At One Ventures and the Industrial Innovation Venture Fund of BDC Capital, with participation from Fulcrum Global Capital and Golden Opportunities, as well as non-dilutive co-investment from Sustainable Development Technology Canada and Protein Industries Canada.

Based in Regina, Canada, Precision AI uses a combination of drones and computer vision to conduct precise application of herbicides and pesticides on weeds. Precision AI’s system deploys swarms of drones that fly over farm fields. The drones can carry a 25 lbs. payload and have a 55 minute flight time. Equipped with both cameras and a sprayer, the drones’ system automatically identifies weeds and sprays them with specific dose of pesticide or herbicide.

The goal is to reduce the waste and cost that comes from indiscriminate, broad application of chemicals to tackle weeds. Additionally, Precision AI’s approach only sprays the weeds, not the crops themselves, so there are fewer chemicals applied to the food we consumer. Precision AI says its drone approach to weed control on large acreage crops is much cheaper than traditional large farming machinery and could reduce the amount of pesticide use by up to 95 percent while maintaining crop yield and saving farmers $52 per acre per growing season.

Precision AI sits at the Nexus of a few trends happening in agriculture. The first, fittingly, is bringing precision control to farms. Sensors and IoT allow the monitoring of things like soil moisture, plant temperature, and fertilization on a more granular level. To get these levels of precision, we’re also seeing automation coming to farms in the form of robots that do everything from carrying gear to zapping weeds with electricity to harvesting crops. Drones are also being employed more monitor farm conditions and plant growth and even pick fruit.

Automation on the farm is actually a topic we’ll be tackling at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18th. We’ll have speakers from Future Acres, AgShift and AgFunder discussing the opportunities that lie ahead for automated precision agriculture. Get your ticket today!

RipeLocker Raises $5M for its Low Atmosphere Approach to Extending Food Freshness

RipeLocker, a Seattle-area startup that makes specialized containers to extend the life of fresh food after harvest, announced yesterday that it has raised a $5 million Series B round of funding. GeekWire was first to report the news, writing that the round was led by angel investors. The total amount raised by RipeLocker is now $12 million.

RipeLocker’s patented technology precisely manages the atmosphere (oxygen, pressure, CO2 and humidity) inside its containers to extend the freshness of perishables. The containers are pallet-sized, made from recyclable material and are reusable. They’re also stackable and can be used in the cold chain, with 40 RipeLockers able to fit inside an ocean or truck refrigeration container.

The company says that it has already completed several trials with berries, pomegranates, cherries, papayas, fresh hops and flowers. According to the funding announcement yesterday, RipeLocker’s containers held freshly harvested organic blueberries in “pristine condition” for eight weeks. The company also said that its RipeLockers extended the life of fresh hops by six weeks.

Approximately 1.3 billion tons of edible food around the world is wasted every year, and that number could reach 2.1 billion tons by 2030. By extending the life of fresh food, RipeLockers can help tackle this waste problem in the supply chain and also bring fresher food to places farther away from farms.

RipeLocker is among a number of new startups that are using technology to improve the way we ship perishables. Companies like Zayndu and Clean Crop Technologies run electricity inside special containers to kill off mold and bacteria and extend the life of fresh food. And TeleSense combines sensors and IoT to monitor the humidity and temperature of grains as they are stored and transported.

RipeLocker said that its containers will become commercially available this summer, and that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has started trialing its containers as a chemical-free quarantine replacement.

NASA Harvest Partners with CropX to Combine Soil Monitoring and Satellite Data

NASA’s Food Security and Agriculture Program, NASA Harvest, and soil analytics company CropX announced a partnership today that will provide insights into soil conditions around the planet to support more sustainable agriculture with higher yields.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, the CropX platform combines hardware sensors that are screwed into the ground with a cloud-based analytics platform. The combined hardware and software analyzes soil moisture, temperature and salinity to help farmers better manage watering and fertilizer application.

The partnership with NASA Harvest will combine CropX’s earthbound technology with NASA’s network of Earth-observing satellites. By marrying underground data with aerial imagery and information, NASA Harvest plans to provide new insights around soil health to governments and farmers around the world.

According to a press release emailed to The Spoon, NASA has already deployed CropX technology across a group of alfalfa farms in Arizona. Over a year-long pilot program that integrates NASA satellite data and synthetic aperture radar, NASA Harvest will be able to establish parameters for water usage estimates, yield prediction, soil quality and land usage assessment based on crop growing cycles.

The race is on to figure out how the world will sustainably feed 9 billion people by the year 2050. Thankfully there are a number of startups tackling the problem from a number of different angles. Companies like Apeel are helping extend the shelf life of products. There is an entire sector of cell-based meat startups working to feed us cultured protein instead of devoting so many resources to raising animals. And partnerships like the one between CropX and NASA Harvest can help spur the adoption of more precision agriculture to reduce waste in the growing process.

Tevel Raises $20M For Its Flying Fruit-Picking Robots

Tevel Aerobotics Technologies, which develops flying fruit-picking robots that provide autonomous on-demand harvest, announced this week it has raised $20 million for its technology. Investors in this round include venture capital firms Maverick Ventures Israel, OurCrowd, AgFunder, as well as Asian agriculture equipment producers Kubota and Forbon. This brings the company’s total funding to $33.9 million, which includes a $2.5 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority (news from AgFunder News).

Tevel, based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, has developed a patented platform called FAR (Flying Autonomous Robots) that is a combination of the actual flying robots, algorithms, AI, and data analytics. The flying robots are equipped with computer vision and AI that detects fruit and foliage, and identifies the type of fruit, size, and ripeness. Attached to the drone is a three-foot-long claw for grabbing and picking the fruit. Additionally, the small drones are capable of other tasks like pruning, trimming, and thinning of orchard trees.

Fruit picking is very dependent on the available labor force, which has been consistently declining throughout the world in the past few years, causing labor shortages in orchards. On top of this, even though agriculture workers are considered essential personnel, the pandemic has caused delays for laborers seeking visas to pick fruit in other countries. Tevel aims to provide a solution to this issue through its platform, which will also allow fruit farmers to use its services exactly when needed to fill unmet labor needs on an on-demand basis.

Tevel is the first flying produce picking robot we’ve covered at The Spoon; however, there are plenty of other agriculture companies using robots on the ground to reduce labor costs and increase efficiency during harvest. Root AI raised $7.2 million last summer for its tomato and strawberry harvesting robots. Companies such as Greenfield Robotics, Small Robot Company, and FarmWise use AI-powered robots to remove weeds from crop fields. My colleague Jenn Marston predicts that we will see more automation in agriculture in 2021, which will include more robots and software technologies that create the optimal environment for particular crops.

Tevel’s new funding will be used to continue the production of its technology and launch its commercial services for orchards. The service is not commercially available for farms yet but the company says it will be conducting pilots of its platform this year in Spain, Italy, and the US. Tevel is also accepting additional equity crowdfunded investments directly and through the investment platform OurCrowd.

Soos Technology Wins $1M Prize in Grow-NY Competition

Israel-based Soos Technology, an animal agriculture technology start-up, was named the winner of the $1M prize for the Grow-NY food and agriculture competition this week. The competition was comprised of over 260 competitors from around the world and included the following runner-ups winners: SoFresh, Zetifi, Candidus, Halomine, Leep Foods, and PureSpace.

Soos Technology aims to disrupt the commercial egg hatchery industry through its incubation system. Through this system, the sex development of poultry embryos is influenced to change a genetic male chick to an egg-laying female. A variety of factors, including temperature, humidity, sound vibration, and carbon dioxide levels, are used to affect the gene expression responsible for the reproductive system.

SOOS - Egg sex determination

The commercial egg hatchery industry is notoriously cruel for male chicks. Since males cannot lay eggs and it takes too long to raise them to become the proper size for meat, male chicks are often culled as soon as they hatch. This means that 6 billion male chicks are culled each year; Soos Technology wants to end this waste of life, energy, water, and incubation space through its incubation system.  

Several countries like the U.S., France, Germany, and Canada aim to get rid of this standard industry practice and are trialing “in-ovo” sexing. The method involves determining the gender of the embryo long before the chick hatches in order to completely avoid the culling of male chicks. The male eggs would be removed from incubation and used for making vaccines and pet food. A Texas-based company, Ovabrite, is developing a technology that separates female and male eggs based on the sex-specific volatile molecules that leak from eggshells. Jerusalem-based eggXYT is implementing CRISPR gene-editing that would cause male eggs to glow under certain lighting.

With “in-ovo” sexing being trialed and Soos Technologies incubation system, it seems possible to end the culling of male chicks in the near future.

Arable Raises $20 Million Series B Round For Agriculture Data Collection Tools

Arable, which makes tools that collect and synthesize agricultural data, announced today that it raised $20 million in its Series B funding round. This round was led by San Francisco-based Prelude Venture Capital, and brings the company’s total funding to $38 million.

I spoke with the CEO of Arable, Jim Ethington, on the phone this week, and he said the company will use the new funding to expand globally and increase its teams in Brazil, Chile, and the U.S. Additionally, the funding will be used to continue the company’s efforts in R&D, including new undisclosed projects.

Arable’s proprietary tech is called the Arable Mark 2, which is essentially a frisbee-shaped disc with several sensors that attaches to a pole. This hardware can be set up by a farmer in as little as 5 minutes. The sensor is able to monitor important metrics like rainfall, humidity, soil moisture, plant temperature, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, and chlorophyll index to name a few. After this data is collected, a farmer can go onto Arable’s app to check these metrics. Additionally, the app can be set to send notifications for any information collected that is important or out of the ordinary.

There are a few other Agtech companies besides Arable focusing on using unique techniques for data collection. Hawaiian-based Sensei Ag has built a 10,000 sq.ft. greenhouse, and uses an AI platform to collect crop data and implement an algorithm for growing practices. InnerPlant recently launched its first sensor plant (a tomato plant) that is fed a particular protein, and using a camera with augmented reality, the plants appear to be a different color when stressed, under attack from pests, or dehydrated.

The Arable Mark 2 and the system that comes along with it start at $850 a year. This subscription includes the hardware, the app, service, and support.

Saga Robotics Raises €9.5M for its UV Light Ag Robot

Saga Robotics, which makes an autonomous robotic platform for agriculture, announced this week that it has raised €9.5 million Euros (~$11.35 million USD). Hortidaily writes that the investment was led by Nysnø Climate Investments with ADM Capital Europe and the Rabo Food & Agri Innovation Fund, with participation from other Norwegian investors.

The Saga Robotics’ platform, dubbed “Thorvald,” is modular and can accomplish a number of different tasks on a farm. We recently wrote about how its UV-light capabilities are being used to kill off mildew on crops without the use of pesticides. According to the Saga Robotics website, Thorvald is also capable of “picking fruits and vegetables, phenotyping, in-field transportation, cutting grass for forage, spraying and data collection/crop prediction.”

Saga’s funding comes at a time when robotics are poised to play a more central role in our agriculture system. In traditional agriculture, farm workers often have to deal with extreme temperatures and other environmental conditions and hazards. The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated and worsened these issues by impacting the flow of labor and becoming a source of outbreaks because of the cramped working conditions.

Robots can potentially help alleviate some of the stresses on farms. In addition to being able to work around the clock and in extreme heat, robots also also don’t get sick and reduce vectors for human-to-human disease transmission.

Saga is among a wave of robotics companies working on agricultural solutions. Small Robot Company, Farmwise, Advanced Farm Technologies, and Augean Robotics are just some of the companies coming to market with automated farm solutions.

Agrisea is Developing Ocean Farms to Grow Rice using Saltwater

Over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. However, only 2.5 percent of that is fresh water, and roughly 70 percent of that is used for agriculture — which also takes up approximately half of Earth’s land. With climate change and soil degradation, the amount of viable cropland is shrinking at an alarming rate.

So why not grow crops using all of that available saltwater? The short answer is salinity — most of our favorite crops can’t grow in such salty environments. But new startup Agrisea is working to change that. The company creates a floating farm ecosystem that grows crops on saltwater, using only . . . saltwater. No soil, no fertilizers, and no fresh water required. The company is currently participating in life science accelerator IndieBio which includes $250,000 in seed funding. 

“We looked at salt water, and saw a nutrient soup,” Agrisea founder Luke Young told me over the phone on a recent call. He and his co-founder Rory Hornby met while studying plant genetics and tissue regeneration, respectively, at Durham University. They united to develop a way to tap into the natural nutrients that are plentiful in oceans — which already sustain plants like algae — and apply to them to some of the world’s most popular crops.

After two years they developed salt-tolerant rice seeds that could thrive either in oceans or in paddies flooded with seawater. The seeds also don’t produce methane, which is a major climate concern for rice farming. In addition to rice, Agrisea has developed salt-tolerant kale seeds and is working on corn and soy.

Those engineered seeds go into modular floating ocean mini-farms which resemble honeycombs, each roughly a foot in diameter. Each unit contains a double layer of mesh: the top one holds in the plants, while the bottom one acts as a fish nursery. Since they’re not static, the farms can be moved if a major weather event like a hurricane is forecasted.

Initially, the company plans to license out its agriculture platform — including the modular units and salt-tolerant rice seeds — to farming companies and governments on a contract basis. Young said that areas which are experiencing saltwater flooding are, unsurprisingly, the most eager to get their hands on the technology. 

And they might be able to in as little as six months. Young said that companies in some areas struggling with flooding, like Vietnam, are ready to use the saltwater farms as soon as they’re available. However, it’ll likely be two to three years until the tech is available in the U.S., where the farms have to get approval by both the FDA and the USDA. “This is an entirely new technology,” Hornby told me. “It’s not aquaculture, so they’re working to develop a new policy around it.”

With a global population set to reach almost 10 billion by 2050 and a finite amount of land and water, companies are hustling to find more sustainable and economical ways to grow food. Some point to hydroponic farming as a panacea, but it still requires massive amounts of freshwater and energy to function — and some doubt its efficacy. Gene-edited plants (like CRISPR) can be made more drought- or heat-resistant, but they still require water and soil inputs.

That’s why Agrisea’s solution has such potential. Yes, its technology is still chiefly untested — but if successful, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Agrisea’s saltwater farms could massively impact global agriculture. Farmers would no longer have to rely on scarce resources like freshwater and land, and could cut down on methane emissions in the process. In areas that are already dealing with the disastrous effects of climate change, Agrisea’s technology could be a positive sea change for agriculture.