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A New Report Details Promise (and Challenges) of Canada’s Food & Ag Tech Ecosystem

The Canadian food and agtech ecosystem is experiencing significant growth, according to a new report published today by the Canadian Food Innovation Network.

The report, which dives deep into specific sectors, funding, sector sizing, key challenges and opportunities, says the Canadian agrifoodtech ecosystem lags behind global leaders in both funding and company concentration. According to the report, USD $1.6 billion has been invested in the sector since 2018, with plant-based proteins emerging as Canada’s largest food tech domain, valued at USD $1.7 billion in 2023. However, compared to its global peers, which tend to allocate just 17% of total agrifoodtech investments into agtech, Canada is a bit over-indexed in agtech with 44% of investments compared to 56% invested in food tech (56%).

Despite a total investment in food tech that is smaller relative to its global peers, the report says Canada is establishing itself as a hub for plant-based proteins, biotech-enabled functional foods, and upcycled ingredients:

“The Plant-Based sector is the most significant, comprising 26% of the Canadian food tech ecosystem (investment), compared to 14% globally. This is followed by Functional Foods & Drinks, representing 12% of companies, and Biotech/ Synthetization—primarily focused on specialty ingredients —with 7% of the Canadian food tech ecosystem. All three domains are also amongst the top five most represented globally.“

According to the report, the Canadian food and ag tech ecosystem faces key challenges relative to the US and other markets, the biggest of which is a lack of private capital. Only 40% of food tech investment rounds are backed by venture capital, compared to 60% in the UK and US. This means a heavy reliance on public grants, which comprise nearly 30% of total funding. This is much higher than in the UK (5%) and US (8%). Other challenges include limited scaling resources due to the country’s large geography and lower overall population density, a fragmented regulatory environment and lack of a national food tech strategy.

Despite these challenges, Canadian Food Innovation Network CEO Dana McCauley is optimistic about the sector’s future.

“These challenges are daunting: labour shortages, supply chain vulnerabilities, climate change, and slow rates of innovation threaten the resilience and sustainability of our food system. Yet, Canada’s foodtech ecosystem is rising to the occasion. By leveraging its unique strengths in plant-based proteins, biotech-enabled functional foods, upcycled ingredients, and beyond, the sector is driving transformative innovations that enhance sustainability, boost economic productivity, and create jobs across the country.”

If you’d like to read the full report, you can find it on the CFIN website.

Video Game Pro? Why Not Join Our Farm: Farmers Seek New Skills to Attract Workers

It’s no secret that farmers face a significant labor crunch, one that’s expected to worsen over the next few years.

One major reason is farmers’ heavy reliance on migrant labor. Unfortunately, there may be far fewer workers available from this vital labor pool in the coming years. Threats of mass deportations under the Trump administration have left many in the agriculture and food industries concerned about the potential impacts on their partners and the broader food supply chain.

“Our ability to feed ourselves as a country is completely jeopardized if you do see the mass deportations,” said Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, in a recent interview.

Compounding this issue is the reality that the average farmer is getting up there in years, with the current average age being 58. Many of these farmers have no succession plan, as younger generations from farm families often show little interest in taking over the family business. As a result, many farms currently producing food may be sold off to developers within the next decade.

But what if new technology could make farming jobs more attractive? According to Tim Bucher, CEO of Agtonomy, one way to address the labor shortage is to reframe farming jobs to appeal to workers with skills gained from unexpected areas, such as video games.

At last week’s CES Ag Tech Summit, hosted by The Spoon, Bucher shared the story of one of Agtonomy’s farming partners who faced a crippling labor shortage. Traditional job postings for tractor drivers had failed to attract candidates, so the partner took a bold step: they adjusted the job description to emphasize “video game experience” for the role of an “AgTech Operator.” The results were remarkable.

“The resume flow exploded,” said Bucher. “They hired ag tech operators who had never set foot in a tractor but were able to operate them and accomplish incredible work.”

This move to leverage new skills goes beyond farming. Some startups are creating platforms specifically optimized for integrating video games and virtual reality expertise. For example, Carbon Origins, a company The Spoon covered at CES three years ago, developed a system that uses virtual reality to operate a bulldozer called “Bobby.” These innovations highlight how skills traditionally seen as unrelated to agriculture or construction are now becoming valuable assets in reimagining labor-intensive industries.

AI and Data Are the New Tractor

In addition to using technology to attract new workers, the technology itself—such as AI and automation—may ultimately be the key to saving many farms that operate on razor-thin margins and struggle to survive in the face of accelerating climate change. During the CES panel, participants highlighted how farmers are leveraging autonomous equipment, precision agriculture tools, and AI-enabled decision-making platforms to better manage their operations.

Jacqueline Heard, CEO of Enko, likened the transformative impact of AI and data-driven tools to that of the tractor, which revolutionized agriculture over the past two centuries.

“If you think about any industrial revolution, that’s what it was—a tractor and autonomy causing this incredible acceleration and making what farmers do easier,” said Heard. “The same goes for AI. Data is the new tractor. I think AI will accelerate just about everything we do, from creating better inputs to solving the massive optimization challenges farmers face on-farm and driving profitability.”

You can watch the entire session below.

AI or Die? Why Farms Must Embrace the AI Revolution to Survive

CES Session: The Future of Farming (Video & Transcript)

The first session we will feature is titled ‘The Future of Farming’, a panel which featured experts on gene-edited crops, molecular farming, and vertical farming.

The session description:

The numerous challenges facing today’s farmers require them to be ever-more-efficient to survive. In this session, we’ll look at how farmers are employing automation, IoT, biotech and more to create the farms of the future.

The panelists for this session included:

  • Vonnie Estes, VP of Innovation, International Fresh Produce Association (Moderator)

  • Haven Baker, Co-Founder, Chief Business Officer at Pairwise

  • Amit Dhingra, CSO | Professor and Department Head, Moolec Science | Texas A&M University

  • Katie Seawell, Chief Commercial Officer, Bowery Farming

This content is available to Spoon Plus subscribers. If you would like to subscribe to Spoon Plus, you can do so here.

Google’s Farm Tech Moonshot Mineral Becomes Alphabet Company

Google parent company Alphabet has added a new company to its portfolio this week in Mineral, a farm tech startup that spent the last five years incubating within Google’s X.

The news of Mineral’s graduation to full-fledged Alphabet company came in the form a blog post by Mineral CEO Elliott Grant (previously of Shopwell, a shopping startup sold to Innit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mineral is to “help scale sustainable agriculture”, which they are doing by “developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world – and make it useful and actionable.”

According to Mineral, they have analyzed over 10% of the total farmland on Earth, modeled more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance ML models. Mineral’s ag-optimized analysis tools will be used to process large unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, public databases, and Mineral’s own proprietary data streams. The company will make this data available to partners to combine this data with their private data to derive insights into yield, genomic understanding, and agronomic discovery.

One such partner is Driscoll’s. The large berry company has been working with Mineral to explore ways to improve data collection in its breeding operations and work on better yield forecasting. The two also worked together to enhance berry inspection using Mineral’s perception tools and, according to Driscoll’s, was able to build a system that many believe performed similarly to human experts.

Another Mineral project Mineral was the creation of a special crop-roving robot named Don Roverto. Don Roverto was used by Mineral to assist the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection. Using Don Roverto, the Alliance, after thirty years of searching, found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics.

Google has often used X to incubate mission-based startups, and Mineral is no different. According to Grant, they chose ag as a vertical because it is “increasingly believed to be a major contributor to the climate crisis — but it is also a victim of a changing climate. There is no time to waste to find more climate-resilient crop varieties, to transition to less chemical- and fossil fuel-intensive practices, to improve soil health, and to restore biodiversity.”

Israel’s Vanilla Vida Wants to Expand and Improve the World’s Favorite Flavor

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor? In addition, how about the idea that 95% of all vanilla sold is synthetic, generally made from an oil or lab-developed chemical compound. Sounds like a supply and demand issue for a real deal vanilla pod.

Vanilla Vida has done its homework and sees an opportunity to tickle the universal taste buds by using technology and data to produce large quantities of top-quality vanilla anywhere in the world. Madagascar and Indonesia are the top crop producers but face issues with uncertain weather, quality control issues, and a long drying process. With proof of concept completed, Vanilla Vida CEO Oren Zilberman is ready to expand beyond Israel and launch climate-controlled farms worldwide.

Zilberman’s experience as a VC is instrumental in the success of his new company. “When you are building a startup, you are always looking about what is the chance it can do a major impact and some change in the world and at the same time, have a really good business,” the company’s CEO said in a recent interview with The Spoon. He also explained that his experience led him not to want to develop something new or go into an unproven segment. By expanding the opportunity for a wildly popular product, such as vanilla, Vanilla Vida can hit the ground running instead of requiring a great deal of marketing to drive customer awareness.

Vanilla Vida’s approach uses technology in the form of climate-controlled growing centers along with data, including image processing, to ensure disease detection, quality control, and plant behavior pattern identification. Zilberman claims that Vanilla Vida’s technology can yield up to three times the volume of existing methods. Going beyond the farming aspect, the company’s IP allows it to alter the metabolism of vanilla beans in ways that increase and even enhance the end product’s flavor.

Founded in 2020, Vanilla Vida recently raised $11.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Ordway Selections, a Swiss investment firm, and money manager for a number of private families. Other investors in the round include PeakBridge, a seed fund specializing in FoodTech, Kibbutz Maagan Michael, and Strauss, which has now made its second investment in the company.

“We are a vertically integrated company,” Zilberman said. Vanilla Vida’s strategy is to create joint ventures with farmers around the globe (although currently solely based in Israel) to place these climate-controlled centers close to flavor houses and food manufacturers.

Zilberman is quick to point out that the global need for vanilla is not a zero-sum game. If 94% of the worldwide supply is synthetic, by entering the market, Vanilla Vida will not endanger the business of existing vanilla producers in countries like Madagascar.

 “We are not here to take an existing piece of the cake from countries such as Madagascar and take food out of their mouths,” Zilberman says. “We are expanding the market for everybody, and we want to help the world use fewer synthetic products and more natural.

Zilberman says that the company is now focused on scaling its business with its proof of concept completed. Initially, that scale will be in Israel, but Europe, the U.S., and other regions are all part of the plan after that. That plan includes expanding the uses for top-of-the-line vanilla, such as creating a floral variety that could be used in the cosmetic industry and a flavoring to mask the taste of children’s medicine.

“There’s no real crop in the world like vanilla in the world in both the challenge and opportunity,” Zilberman adds. “It’s an industry with zero innovation, which is unusual when the product has the world’s most popular taste and smell.”

Investor Look: 10 Trends to Watch in Ag + Food Tech in 2022

Food, ocean and agtech venture fund S2G Ventures released a report citing ten catalysts that will shape intersecting industries including agriculture, food manufacturing, nutrition and food retail in 2022. The report examines the trends that are driving the transition to a climate-smart, healthy food system.

S2G — investor in several food and agtech startups — looks at technology disruption in three major categories including agricultural innovation, supply chain disruption and personalized food and nutrition.

“The food transition is still in its infancy but is being propelled by seismic tailwinds: massive demographic change spurring new consumer demand, significant advancements in the biology, chemistry and physics of food production to create new choices and now capital markets anchored by ESG that want to fund high growth, disruptive companies,” commented Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer.

Farmers in the US are facing new challenges every day from nutrient-challenged soil to lack of access to capital. The S2G report describes the ways that innovation in fintech, robotics and biotech along with an increase in socially and environmentally conscious investing (ESG) will lead to the “fourth industrial revolution” in farms across the country.

The drivers of innovation in farming include:

  • Robots will increase efficiency while reducing labor needs across the food system.
  • The rise of ESG will help to digitize the farm.
  • Fintech will transform opportunities in agriculture, just as it did for the student loan and mortgage markets.
  • RNA technology that saved lives during Covid-19 will be applied to farms to save soils.

Supply chain disruptions experienced over the past two years have catalyzed both governmental institutions NGOs and the private sectors to fund and drive innovation in biotech, cellular agriculture and food waste solutions. The result according to S2G Ventures will be supply chains that are more nimble, sustainable, localized and less wasteful.

Innovations that will revolutionize supply chains include:

  • Fermentation will power the next generation of alternative protein products.
  • Cellular protein will provide consumers around the world with safe, sustainable food.
  • Adoption of food waste solutions will be recognized as both a good business practice and an essential tool for feeding the world.

Even prior to the pandemic, consumers were demonstrating a desire for better food choices and a renewed focus on ways to personalize their nutrition and healthcare. To answer this demand, food and nutrition startups are using cutting-edge bio and food science as well as AI and machine learning to develop nutrient-dense, functional and personalized food products.

Personalized food & nutrition catalysts include:

  • AI and machine learning platforms will unlock greater understanding of and use cases for plants and fungi.
  • Food will become central to the effort to prevent chronic disease and improve health outcomes.
  • Food brands and grocers will have to “personalize or perish.”

To dig into more details on areas to watch in food and agtech this year, download the full report from S2G Ventures.

In 2022, Molecular Farming Startups Will Move Toward Commercialization of Animal-Free Proteins

Like many of the technologies that are driving innovation in the alternative protein space, plant molecular farming has traditionally been used in the pharmaceutical industry. The practice — which involves genetically editing a crop so that its cells produce a desired protein — is being discussed as a way to rapidly produce proteins for COVID-19 vaccines.

In the food industry, molecular farming is one route to producing the animal proteins that give egg, dairy, and meat products their visual, taste, and functional properties. Molecular farming allows you to use the exact same protein that would normally be produced by a chicken or cow, without the need for any actual animals.

Moolec Science, a spinoff of Argentina-based agtech company Bioceres Crop Solutions, is probably the most prominent name in molecular farming for the food industry. Moolec already sells chymosin, a cheesemaking enzyme, which the company grows in safflower plants. They’ve also successfully grown meat proteins in soybean and pea plants.

The Moolec team believes that molecular farming can help to bring down the end costs of alternative meat products. (“There’s nothing better than low-tech farming to produce at an enhanced scale and low cost,” company CEO and co-founder Gastón Paladini told The Spoon back in October.) And they may be right.

Molecular farming can help producers to avoid some of the costly and tricky problems of growing proteins in traditional bioreactors. When you use a plant as your bioreactor, as food scientist and thought leader Tony Hunter pointed out in an article this year, you don’t need to worry about maintaining sterile conditions: Plants have built-in immune systems.

Moolec plans to launch its first animal-free meat protein in late 2022 or early 2023. The company is currently working toward regulatory approval for its products — and its progress will be an interesting test of regulatory tolerance of Moolec’s brand of genetic engineering.

One potential concern for regulators as they scrutinize molecular farming processes will be the possibility of gene flow from modified crops to related plants. Tiamat Sciences, a Belgium-based molecular farming startup, is limiting that possibility by growing its crops in a contained vertical farming system.

Tiamat has plans to expand alongside the cell-based meat industry. “By targeting nascent markets on the verge of scale-up, we’ve already demonstrated significant traction for our solutions and an early revenue potential that is outstanding for a biotech startup,” said Tiamat’s founder and CEO France-Emmanuelle Adil in a recent press release. The company currently produces GRAS-certified, animal-free growth factors for cultivated meat, and also manufactures proteins for the pharmaceutical industry.

Last month, Tiamat announced that it had raised a $3 million seed funding round led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm True Ventures. The company is using those funds to construct a pilot facility in Durham, N.C. — so we may see them boost their capacity in the year to come.

Molecular farming startups still have some issues to work out. As Tony Hunter noted in his piece on molecular farming, plant tissue has larger and fewer protein-producing cells compared to the same volume of mammal tissue, making plants less productive as protein factories. And there are costs associated with extracting protein molecules from plants at the cellular level.

Still, the same upsides of molecular farming that make it attractive to the pharmaceutical industry will likely continue to spark interest from alternative protein producers — especially as those producers seek ways to bring down the retail prices of their products.

Big Idea Ventures Unveils Start-ups in Newest Accelerator Cohort

Big Idea Ventures is an early-stage investor in food technologies, and this week the firm announced the list of start-ups that are a part of its bi-annual accelerator program.

For this cohort, 17 start-ups focused on food and climate challenges were selected to receive pre-seed investment through the firm’s offices in New York, Singapore, and Paris. This is the first cohort for the Paris program and the fourth cohort for the New York and Singapore programs. The accelerator program is part of Big Idea Venture’s New Protein Fund, which invests in alternative protein products and ingredients.

Here’s more info about the selected companies:

New York Program

Fybraworks Foods – grows real animal meat proteins with microbes and is the first company to develop recombinant muscle protein for food applications.

De Novo Dairy – the first African company to use precision fermentation technology, this start-up is replicating dairy to create animal-free cheese, yoghurt, and ice cream.

Prosel Biosciences – uses microalgae to produce bioidentical food proteins and selenoprotein-modified industrial enzymes.

BetterMilk – using mammary cells and a genetic engineering platform, the B2B company will sell their alternative milk and milk ingredients to companies in the food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry.

Liven Proteins – produces animal-free protein ingredients through the fermentation of agriculture and food industry by-products (gelatin is the company’s first product).

Maya Milk – uses precision fermentation to produce animal-free dairy proteins and fats with the same sensory experience that animal-based dairy provides.

Singapore Program

Phyx44 – using precision fermentation, the start-up is producing animal-free dairy proteins & fats to recreate milk.

LILO Desserts – sourcing fruit waste and low-grade fruit not fit for grocery stores, LILO is creating snacks and desserts, such as plant-based cheesecake.

Fisheroo – the first to use cellular agriculture technology to create surimi, a minced fish paste commonly found in East Asian cuisine.

Mogale Meat – with its proprietary biobank of stem and satellite cell lines, Mogale is producing cultivated meat analogs, with a focus on African game meat.

Paris Program

Bright Biotech – with the goal of bringing cell-based meat to consumers quicker, this start-up has developed a plant-based technology that uses chloroplasts as chassis to manufacture large amounts of affordable growth factors.

Green-On – developing saturated fat and fatty acids to replace palm oil using only carbon dioxide, electricity, and, water. 

Little Bandits – developing non-dairy, soy-free products for children.

Luyef Biotechnologies – a cell-based meat company that has developed myoglobin protein to provide the flavor and aroma of real meat for plant-based meat alternatives.

The VERY Food co. – creating plant-based ingredients for cooking, including eggs, cream, and butter.

YOFI – creating organic plant-based milk alternatives with peas.

MOA foodtech – transforming food waste and agriculture byproducts into a “next-generation protein” through the use of artificial intelligence and biotechnology.

Maya Milk’s milk protein product

Amongst the selected start-ups, developing alternative dairy is one of the predominant focuses. The alternative dairy market is the most developed category in the plant-based space, and it is expected to reach a value of $54 billion by 2028. YOFI, The VERY Food Co., and Little Bandits are entering this crowded space using explicitly plant-based ingredients to develop their alternative products. On the other hand, Maya Milk, Phyx44, and De Novo Dairy are each using precision fermentation to create animal-free dairy products, while BetterMilk makes alternative milk using mammary cells and its’ genetic engineering platform.

In 2020, $366 million in funding flowed to companies developing alternative meat using cellular agriculture. Cultivated meat and seafood, a global market expected to be worth $25 billion by 2030, is another theme in this cohort. Fybraworks Foods, Luyef Biotechnologies, Bright Biotech, Mogale Meat, and Fisheroo fall into this category.

LILO Dessert’s packaged cheesecake made from fruit waste and damaged fruits

Global food waste is a major issue that has garnered attention in recent years, and one that companies in the food and agriculture tech space have attempted to provide solutions to. In this cohort, MOA Foodtech and LILO Desserts are each using some form of food waste to develop new products.

To date, Big Idea Ventures has invested in 65 alternative protein companies, including this current cohort. Currently, the firm is accepting applications for its next accelerator cohorts (beginning in early 2022) in New York, Paris, and Singapore.


Watch This Video of Innerplant’s Glowing Plants in Action

InnerPlant is an agtech company that engineers plant DNA to turn them into “living sensors”. When plants glow a certain color, this signals that it is stressed from lack of water, pests, or nutrient deficiencies. This helps farmers spot stressed plants much more quickly than they normally would be able to, and therefore have a better chance of mitigating crop loss.

Last week, The Spoon was given a virtual zoom tour of the InnerPlant facilities and shown the glowing plants under lasers. The company had examples of the two plant species it is currently working with, tomatoes and Arabidopsis. The colored light is not visible to the human eye, so Roderick Kumimoto, the Chief Science Officer of InnerPlant, used different laser pointers to demonstrate the glow. In the field, farmers use InnerPlant’s augmented reality system to photograph with an iPhone or iPad to detect glowing plants.

As you can see, the engineered plants look just like the regular non-engineered plants in normal lighting. Turn the lights off and point a laser at them, the engineered tomato and Arabidopsis plants have a yellow, red-orange, and green glow.

To create the living sensor plants, InnerPlant adds a fluorescent protein (which is safe for human consumption) into the plant’s DNA. Different colors signal different problems. If the farmer is using satellites or drones to view the plants from above, then up to three colors can be detected. From a ground-level view, upwards of seven to eight colors can be seen.

The companies first products are tomato and Arabidopsis plants that signal if they are under attack by fungus or pests. Currently, the company is working on commercializing InnerSoy plants. After that, they plan to develop cotton and corn versions of their glowing plants.

We Talked To Bowery Farming About the Community Impact of Their Indoor Farming Expansion

Back in December, The Spoon reported on Bowery Farming’s plans to build a new, indoor farm in Bethlehem, Pa. The New York-based company already runs two commercial farms in the Mid-Atlantic region, plus two R&D facilities and a plant science innovation hub in New Jersey.

Bowery plans to open the Bethlehem farm sometime this year or in 2022—and meanwhile, they’re expanding in other ways. The company has doubled its revenue this year. Its products are sold in over eight times as many stores as they were last January.

Last week, The Spoon joined Bowery’s Chief Commercial Officer, Katie Seawell, on Zoom to find out how the company is engaging local communities as it expands its operations.

The most obvious way that Bowery’s farms bring value to their communities is by producing nutritious, pesticide-free food. The company expects its new Bethlehem facility to produce about 20 million clamshells of leafy greens and other produce per year. (To grow that volume of food via conventional agriculture, you’d need to use up 5 million square feet of land.)

Seawell attributes some of Bowery’s recent growth to rising consumer interest in locally grown produce and food supply chain issues—both in turn influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of the day, she says, the company wants to build a more sustainable, productive farming model that will weather disasters.

“If we can minimize the externalities of climate change, weather events, and other disruptions that you see in the traditional food system, and can create surety of supply in a way that is more sustainable,” says Seawell, “then we can meet the moment, meet the demands of our growing population. That’s the model we’re cracking with indoor vertical farming at Bowery.”

Last year, the USDA declared Bethlehem’s South Side a food desert. The Brown and White, a local newspaper, reported on the abundance of fast food and relative lack of healthy options in the area.

Of course, Bowery’s expansion won’t solve that problem if its products aren’t accessible to locals. Seawell says that the company is taking a multi-pronged approach to boost accessibility as it expands its commercial footprint. First, the team is taking steps to make its products available to consumers across a wide range of retailers—from Whole Foods and independent grocery stores to Walmart and Giant.

“We’re also looking at innovative models for bringing our product to communities,” says Seawell. Bowery donates produce to nonprofit hunger relief organizations, including Maryland Food Bank and Table to Table.

The company has also partnered with D.C. Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that acts as a wholesale partner, reselling Bowery products to local corner stores at reduced rates. Through its Healthy Corners food program, the organization is working on building the infrastructure for corner stores to carry more fresh foods. “It’s a really cool program because it’s not just access to fresh food that these communities need,” says Seawell, “it’s the infrastructure to support fresh food programs.”

Seawell says the company will explore further community partnerships as it expands to Bethlehem and beyond.

The team is also excited about the Bethlehem farm because of the opportunities that it represents for the former industrial powerhouse. Bowery received grant support for the project from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and the Governor’s Action Team. The farm will be part of an economic redevelopment project intended to boost employment and create new opportunities in the area.

The farm will be located at a site that was once home to a steel mill. The tract has been identified as a brownfield (or potentially contaminated) site. “This is land that you could not farm in a traditional sense,” says Seawell. “So what we’re doing is transitioning this non-arable land into a highly productive farm that will serve this community.”

Seawell says Bowery provides entry-level employment opportunities that require no previous agricultural experience. Bowery farms also provide year-round employment, in contrast to conventional farms, which generally have seasonal work cycles.

“We cast a very wide net in terms of who we recruit in the community,” she says. “We look more for a cultural fit than any specific, hard skill set.”

The company is also considering the energy footprint of its new facility. Its existing commercial farms are run using low-impact hydropower. Seawell says the team is currently considering renewable energy strategies for the Bethlehem farm.

Last spring, Bowery raised $300 million in Series C funding, which it will use to accelerate its farming expansion and bring new products to market. Seawell says that as the company considers new sites in the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, the team will continue to weigh their commercial bases, the availability of untapped talent pools, and sustainability issues.

“We aspire to take this model nationally, and eventually globally,” says Seawell. “So in many ways, the new Bethlehem farm is a milestone for us as we continue to think about a national footprint for Bowery.”

Edete Precision Technologies Increases Pistachio Yields With Pollinator Robots

Many plants and trees rely on natural phenomena like bees and wind to be pollinated and produce fruit. However, bee colony collapse and climate change threaten the ability of these crops to be pollinated. An Israeli ag-tech start-up called Edete Precision Technologies addresses this mounting concern using robots and artificial pollination technology.

This week, the company announced in a press release sent to The Spoon that it has successfully used its robot pollinators to increase yields in pistachio orchards by 24 percent. 

The start-up’s robot is called the 2BeTM pollinator, and it disperses a precise amount of pollen into flowers during the pistachio tree blooming season. Normally, pistachio trees are naturally pollinated by the wind blowing pollen (male sperm) into the female ovule. However, climate change may be contributing to the desynchronization of male and female trees blossoming, which results in lower crop yields. 

For pistachio farmers, this 24 percent increase in yields equates to an additional $1,850 in income per acre.

The last time The Spoon wrote about Edete, the company was addressing the problem of bee colony collapse and the role this plays in the crops that depend on this. In Australia and California, Edete uses its technology to artificially pollinate almond trees. 

Robots and automation are becoming more prevalent in agriculture. Tevel, another Israel-based ag-tech company, developed flying robots for harvesting fruit. Farmwise, Small Robot Company, and Greenfield Robotics all have different variations of autonomous weed-picking robots.

Edete completed its pilot run of artificially pollinated pistachio trees in Sacramento, California on an 82-acre orchard. Now, the company is gearing up to offer its pollination technology to other growers in California for when the pistachio blooming season starts in April 2022.

You can see how Edete’s robotic pollination works in the video below:

Edete Artificial Pollination 2020

Oishii is Bringing its Specialty Indoor Strawberries to Los Angeles

The Omakase Berry is a varietal of strawberry grown in Japan known for its creamy texture, level of sweetness, and aromatic qualities. Courtesy of Oishii, a controlled environment agriculture (CEA) company that grows strawberries, Omakase Berries are coming to Los Angeles.

Oishii currently has two indoor farm locations on the East Coast in New York and New Jersey, and the new Los Angeles facility will be the first on the West Coast. According to the press release sent to The Spoon, Oishii is the “only vertical farming company to have perfected the strawberry at commercial scale”. Its indoor farms use zero pesticides, and its strawberries are a carbon-neutral crop.

When we last wrote about Oishii in April 2021, an eight-pack of the Omakase Berries cost $50. Unfortunately, heading west hasn’t resulted in lower prices, despite the company’s stated plans that it had plans to start growing an “everyday berry” that would be offered at a more affordable price. If you want to order the berries in Los Angeles, they are still set at the same expensive price.

With its focus on strawberries and other fruits and vegetables, Oishii stands apart from other indoor farm companies which mainly grow leafy greens and herbs. In October 2020, Driscoll and indoor farm company, Plenty, announced their partnership to start growing strawberries indoors. Hopefully, once Plenty makes it berries commercially available and Oishii develops an “every day” strawberry, consumers will have access to a more affordable indoor-grown strawberry.

The Omakase Berries are available for pre-order on Oishii’s website. The berries are available at a restaurant called Destroyer in Los Angeles.