Main Sequence Challenge Briefing
What is a Main Sequence Challenge?
Main Sequence is Asia Pacific’s deep-tech venture fund, founded by Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. The valuable companies of the next few decades will be those tackling epic problems for a planet in trouble. We believe that the combined force of entrepreneurship + science can solve these problems. Main Sequence challenges, led by specific members of the investment team, guide us to discover, create and fuel companies to deliver these solutions at scale to the planet.
Why this challenge?
We need to make a lot more food and we’re running out of planet to do it.
According to the World Resources Institute, there is a 56% food gap between what we make today and what we will need by 2050.
Agrifood is a $7.8t global market that employs 40% of the working population (Agfunder) which is impossible to scale using current methods. The ‘inconvenient truth’ is that humans have run out of planet.
Food production occupies 40% of land, causes 30% of human produced greenhouse gas emissions and uses 70% of fresh water.
Just looking at meat production:
Today, we ourselves, together with the livestock we rear for food, constitute 96% of the mass of all mammals on the planet. Only 4% is everything else — from elephants to badgers, from moose to monkeys. And 70% of all birds alive at this moment are poultry — mostly chickens for us to eat.
David Attenborough: Foreword to The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review.
If we continue to produce food in this way, we will breach planetary boundaries that humans depend upon. Look at how much greenhouse gas emissions come from Animal Products and how that will almost double in the next few decades.
It’s invisible to most of us, but we have engineered the planet to produce food for humans to live but we are crowding out the biodiversity that makes this sustainable into the future. If we continue to produce food the way we do today then agriculture will be using 70% of Earth’s GHG ‘budget’ by 2050.
To produce food in the same way we do today, we will need another 595 Mha (almost another Australia) of land to farm, while the ‘budget’ for 2050 is to use no more than we use today.
Partha Dasgupta’s paper, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, stresses the need for a whole new approach to economics that accounts for natural capital as well as human and produced capital. The new insight here is that we do not have infinite natural capital to match our objectives for GDP growth. Unless we manage growth of natural capital then other forms of capital may collapse.
Mary Ann Augustin and D Knorr in their paper, From value chains to food webs: The quest for lasting food system, tell us about Earth Overshoot Day:
Earth Overshoot Day, the day when all humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services in a given year exceed what Earth can regenerate in that year.
Earth Overshoot Day is likely to be sometime in August this year. Note the blip in 2020 when Coronavirus gave the planet a rest — showing that action can be taken. We should make it a national holiday.
This, to us, is a hugely valuable set of problems to solve that map well to incredible leaps of scientific knowledge that can go at them.
Solution Space
Martin Cole from University of Adelaide provided us with an actionable way to think about the solution space with his food wedges framework.
Avoid losses: This probably one of the least solved wedges because a lot of food is still wasted all along the supply chain. Example solutions we are looking for include:
Novel ways of using more of the food that is grown. For example, most of a broccoli is wasted today because we only eat the flower on top.
New crop traits that are less prone to pest or weather damage.
Packaging that helps food last longer along the supply chain and in the home. Including making packaging from food waste instead of petrochemicals.
Ways of transforming spoiled food into new food products including animal feed. Various insect companies are doing this and increasing levels of scale.
Supply chain tracking to prevent waste from uncertain food provenance.
Digital biosecurity nets, leaving less to chance with major loss from disease and pests.
Fill the production shortfall: How we make more with less. Example solutions we are looking for:
New crop traits that grow more biomass with fewer inputs.
Microbial technologies that improve the quality of the soil for improved yield.
Methane abatement technologies that reduce the amount of GHG emissions in beef and dairy industries for each kilo of meat or litre of milk.
Biological pesticides that allow for mass scale agriculture without destroying the ecosystem over time that fuels the yield.
Protective cropping / vertical farming technologies that can grow food at scale with less inputs.
Digital agronomy technologies that enable precision farming for maximum yield and managing natural capital.
Production automation technology where machines precisely maximise yield.
Reduce the Demand Trajectory: Changing eating behaviour and new ways of producing food at scale with fewer inputs. Example solutions we are looking for:
Shopping systems that change diets in the population.
New kinds of food — plant-based proteins, cellular agriculture.
Ways to redirect high nutrition food back to humans instead of animals. e.g. use insect agriculture for animals freeing up soy (and the land it grows on) for feeding humans.
Making food from CO2 and other forms of waste.
Australia’s Advantage
Australia is the second largest agricultural landmass on Earth after China at 328m hectares. Most of this is cattle farming with about 1/10th of that used for cropping. The quality of the land for growing is incredibly varied with much of it challenging, and getting worse as climate change (drought, fire, flood) stretches the ability of our growers.
Australia has a long history of using science and human ingenuity to feed its population. In fact, we do it so well that we export 70% what we make. CSIRO itself was founded over 100 years ago around the challenges in food production and to this day, about a third of the organisation is Ag & Food.
Australia’s Rural Development Corporations and various state departments of primary industry join world class universities leading the world in agrifood innovation.
In recent years, a new synthetic biology capability has emerged that will power novel new food production for decades to come.
We’ve got the labs and the scientific talent, combined with an industrious and resilient agriculture sector to rise to this challenge.
Adjacent Challenges
Energy & Decarbonisation: Solutions in this challenge interface with new energy to create smaller energy footprints in production systems. Make food with carbon. Most next generation food production is designed to have a low impact on the planet — much of it uses carbon as an input rather than an output.
Materials: The same feedstock and methods we use to create new food can also be used to make new materials, like biodegradable plastics, textiles and alternatives to concrete.
Health & Wellbeing: As we engineer food to enhance nutrition we create products that overlap with health and wellbeing. Increasingly new foods will have health claims on the label.
Activity within MSV
The Feed 10b People team at Main Sequence Ventures includes myself (Phil Morle), Mike Zimmerman and Gabrielle Munzer. We work with our companies and the system they are a part of to bring the opportunities to life.
We work across the research system to understand the best research and the people that are bringing it to life.
We discover and unlock capacity in labs, scale-up plants and industry to assist getting our companies (and others in the industry) to scale and impact sooner.
We work with large retailers and food companies to understand what they need and how startups can help them to reach their goals sooner.
Who we are working with so far
Fill Production Shortfall
Regrow Ag: Sustainability management system for farmers and agronomists — digitising and verifying sustainability practices such as carbon sequestration and fertiliser use.
Lumachain: AI provenance system for the meat industry deliver new levels of safety and accountability across the supply chain.
RapidAIM: digital pest management system to identify insect pests quickly, reducing the need for chemical pesticides.
Decrease Demand Trajectory
v2food: Plant-based meat company making meat for meat-lovers with a fraction of the impact on the planet.
Nourish: Making animal fat without animals
Clara Foods: Making proteins such as egg whites and pepsin without animals.