We need to be less incremental in our thinking about food production
Why do we need to talk about food production?
Most of us take food for granted where our food comes from. I for one have the expectation that I can buy what I want, when I want it from a supermarket less than a kilometre away from my house. But the job of making it and getting it into our bodies is a fragile process — as many of us recently observed during Covid19 when supermarket shelves were bare.
We are likely to need 2x the food we produce today over the next few decades as we race towards 10b people. But we are up against planetary boundaries and it is simply impossible to make 2x the food in the way that we do it today.
Here’s some numbers that may surprise you. Agriculture produces 30% of human produced GHG, 40% of land is used for agriculture and 70% of the freshwater.
We’ve run out of planet and there is no ‘Plan B’. Humans need to eat, the animals we produce need to eat, there will be more of us… we need more food.
The good news is that there are solutions for all of this. Humans are clever and science is unlocking ways to to make more with less by using high tech solutions to maximise yield and reduce inputs and waste. And even more exciting, figuring out how to harness nature itself to create the abundance we need in a sustainable way.
How we can 2x Australian Meat Production
There is a massive opportunity for the Australian meat industry to make meat from plants as well as animals.
Science now knows how to do a better job than mashing up legumes and vegetables into burger and sausage shapes. We can now cause proteins to change their structure into the heterogeneous experience of meat.
v2food is doing this. At the start of the process is the soybean which can be sustainably grown by the same producers who farm animals. Soybeans are about $200 / tonne. With molecular science we can create the meat texture that’s chewy and gets stuck in your teeth, with flavour chemistry we can build up the same amino acids in animal meat to create smells and tastes that are unlocked as the food cooks and caramelises into delicious crusty edges. We can create natural alternatives to blood that begin red and transform to brown as the meat cooks and we can create fat profiles that give melt in your mouth experiences. And this process can be made compatible with traditional meat supply chains, so it can be prepared, moved and sold by the traditional meat industry. Commodity soy at $200/ tonne transformed to meat at $10,000 / tonne.
Companies like v2food deliver new categories of meat that can expand (perhaps in time double) the $1.4T dollar global meat industry because they have a fractional impact on the planet AND they have a no compromise experience for the majority of the population who love meat.
With breakthrough technologies like this, the meat industry can diversify and scale and Australia could create industrial giants in the next generation of food production.
In the near future, there will be tanks that grow meat right next to the processing facilities that transform meat into food at an industrial scale as we learn to ‘domesticate the cell’ as well as animals.
Science can do magical things in tanks. Insulin for example is produced at scale by genetically modifying yeast to make insulin instead of alcohol when it eats a feedstock like sugar. The insulin itself is not genetically modified but it is made from yeast that has been.
Imagine this, before we had this technology insulin was extracted from pigs and 8 tonnes of pig pancreas was needed for every litre of insulin. This new approach makes the same stuff, cleanly and efficiently at a massive scale.
We can make food the same way.
Our portfolio company, Clara Foods is making animal proteins such as egg whites that way. Nourish is making animal fats without the animals. We can make ‘milk’ this way. In fact, we could double the world’s milk supply, without a single cow, using the Queensland sugar cane harvest as a feedstock.
This breakthrough technology is called synthetic biology and Australia is very good at it. Queensland in particular is building on its concentration of talent, labs and feedstock to be a global leader in this field.
We’ll need this IN ADDITION to traditional agriculture. And traditional agriculture can benefit from high tech food as well. Queensland sugar cane can produce animal fats and proteins. The same farmers are starting to rotate their cropping with soy beans to prevent runoff into the Great Barrier Reef. These soybeans can make… ‘meat’. Producers that farm animals can also rotate soybeans and add another category of meat to their inventory. We’re also looking at ways that one of the fermentation epicentres of the world — South Australia’s wine region — can also use their facilities for brewing other kinds of food. A protein harvest as well as a grape harvest!
Agriculture, old and new can benefit from courageously claiming Australia as a food production centre of the world.
CSIRO predicts that the Australian agrifood industry will swell from $187b to $250b over the next decade but I think it can be so much more if we lean into these breakthrough technologies.
Australian total meat exports today are $12 billion. The CSIRO’s Food and Agribusiness Roadmap projects an additional $6.6 billion — equivalent to half of our current meat industry — of new opportunity by 2030 from alt protein.
And this assumes that vegan/vegetarian consumers (about 2% of the population) will drive this, but I believe everyone will introduce these next generation foods into their diet, because we must in order to feed 10b people. That’s a big opportunity for Australia to punch above its weight.
As a community, if we keep talking and we share a conviction that we can lead the world with this new industry from Australia — there is much to gain for us all… and for Australia as it seeks new growth out of these troubling times.