Meatless Meat

Climate and Tech Expected to Affect Ag Most This Year

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 19:43:28 GMT

Farm Journal’s Smart Farming Week is an annual week-long emphasis on innovation in agriculture. The goal is to encourage you to explore and prioritize the technology, tools and practices that will help you farm smarter. Innovation today ensures an efficient, productive and sustainable tomorrow.

Every year before the ball drops in Times Square, it seems everyone wants to pull out a crystal ball and prophesize what the new year will bring. And the ag industry loves a good prophet.

Before 2023 became history, Forbes Magazine took its shot at predicting agriculture’s highlights for 2024. So before Father Time turns the predictions stale, I thought it might be insightful, or at least entertaining, to provide some color commentary on the article, which focused on the following five areas where change in agriculture could be the greatest.

1. Farmland Holds the Key to Carbon Management
No different from last year or the prior year, agriculture has a bull’s-eye on its back when it comes to carbon intensity. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, U.S. agricultural operations are responsible for 10.6% of the nation’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists and Al Gore have told us this for years now. Expect the barrage of white papers and warnings to continue in 2024.

The good news, according to the pundits, is it will become increasingly clear this year that farmland is the key to carbon management. By default, nature has been seen as the most scalable way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. What is becoming more obvious to those outside the sphere of agriculture is that farmland is the best place to store it.

Look to see more announcements at the consumer packaged goods level regarding programs and collaboration across industries and sectors to foster regenerative practices at the production level. Companies such as Walmart, PepsiCo and General Mills are seeking programs able to scale such practices across millions of acres.

2. Alternative Proteins Will Recover From Their Sophomore Slump
Last year, the stock market and the population’s tastes soured on meatless burgers and chickpea chicken nuggets. Beyond Meat’s market cap plummeted from an all-time high of $14.2 billion to just more than $500 million at the turn of this year.

But don’t count out the alternative protein industry yet. Those quoted in the Forbes article anticipate 2024 to be a renaissance year for animal-based product substitutes.

The reason for such renewed hope is a tactical marketing change adopted by the second wave of alternative protein startups. Instead of taking full-blown consumer-ready products direct to the grocery store shelf and the fast food drive-through lane, they are focusing on selling alternative protein products as ingredients.

For example, the Every Company is touting that “the world’s first liquid egg made without the hen” could replace real eggs in thousands of processed food items. Rue the day these eggs find their way into my favorite lemon meringue pie.

3. Forget Counting Calories. Count Carbon
A new diet seems to be on the table every new year. This year, paring down the amount of carbon in your life may be as important as limiting your calories. Just like requirements for disclosing calories through food labels, the social, political and regulatory environment is forcing food companies to be fully transparent about their carbon footprints.

Instead of carbon credits, experts say carbon insets are needed to move the climate needle. With recently passed climate disclosure legislation, such as California’s SB 253, expect more food companies looking to measure, report and reduce their carbon emissions.

This switch will put pressure on producers as food companies off-load the burden of carbon reduction on them. Look for additional emphasis on cutting methane emissions from livestock through innovative feeds and carbon-capture techniques and improving soil health through biotech innovation, data and artificial intelligence.

4. Technology Will Make Ag More Hip and Exciting
Agriculture has long been characterized in literature, and even nursery rhymes, as boring and depressing—think Grapes of Wrath and Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Well, technology is continuing to turn this industry on its head.

Specialty crop operations’ use of automation will grow quickly as ag labor shortages persist. Meanwhile, the food prep industry is transforming as food- and medicine-focused companies take root. Think HelloFresh and Blue Apron meet your medical dietician. Companies such as ModifyHealth are tailoring chef-inspired medical meals to support consumers’ specific health needs, and companies such as Farmer’s Fridge allow you to select a green goddess salad or Thai noodle bowl instead of a Snickers bar from a vending machine.

5. Capital Investment in Ag Will Be Even More Deliberate and Disciplined
Once viewed as the hot new space for disruption, the ag tech sector is now weeding out the venture capital investors who entered it with hopes of quick wins. That culling really started in earnest two years ago and is predicted to continue this year.

But all is not gloom and doom in the ag startup arena. Investors see the market stabilizing and valuations returning to more realistic levels. Quality companies that are scaling, have good economic fundamentals and growing customer demand will likely find the capital they are seeking in 2024, but expect no more free lunches.

So there you have it. This recaps the Forbes take on agriculture in the new year: climate, carbon, technology, money and a world with eggs but no chickens.

If you think that’s weird, then just wait. The year has only begun. In agriculture, nearly anything can happen. Just wait a day.

Hostile Headwinds Hitting Ag Startups

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:29:23 GMT

Bah humbug! That’s the sentiment likely invoked by the USDA’s latest economic outlook. It certainly doesn’t sound like 2023 will end with a very merry Christmas, and 2024 isn’t shaping up to be a happy new year.

According to USDA’s Economic Research Service, projected U.S. net farm income plummeted by $42 billion this year—reaching $141 billion. This was a 23% income drop compared with just last year. If realized, then the decline will be the largest on record in nominal terms and the third largest of all time when adjusting for inflation.

Given the expectations for continued inflated production expenses coupled with weakening crop and livestock prices, farm incomes are likely to be pressured even lower in 2024. And don’t count on any Christmas miracle from Congress in the form of economic or regulatory relief — or even a new farm bill.

This situation is nothing new to those on the front lines of agriculture. Margins are constantly being squeezed, but this time it is negatively affecting a sector beyond the farm gate—and it could cast a long, dark shadow on the industry as a whole.

Investment in agrifood technology funding is down—way down. That’s not good as efficiency gained through the continued development and adoption of new technologies has been one of production agriculture’s few economic saviors in the past several decades.

AgFunder’s most recent Global AgriFoodTech Investment Report showed a 44% drop in the sector’s investments during 2022 compared with 2021. Mind you, that number must be taken with a grain of salt as 2021 was a record-breaking year. However, the downward trend has continued into 2023.

Things Are Starting to Crack
It is no secret what’s happening. The economic side effects from the pandemic showed up as out-of-control inflation and rapidly rising interest rates — a combination of circumstances we haven’t seen since the days of Jimmy Carter. We all know the ag economic train wreck that ensued and the subsequent farm crisis of the 1980s.

As access to “cheap money” has dried up within the investment community, so has confidence in ag tech investments. Add a war in Ukraine and now another in Israel to the mix, and the risks faced when betting on an agricultural startup have probably never been higher.

Certain areas have shown accelerated weakness as funding for overall tech has slowed. The vertical farming bubble is popping, and investors are taking dollars off the table when it comes to the “fake meat” crusade.

They’re finding that growing produce indoors and redefining the core ingredients in the American cheeseburger are really hard to do. For example, Fifth Season, a large vertical farming operation that provided salad kits to Whole Foods and Kroger, abruptly shut down operations in November of last year. Meanwhile, Beyond Meat lost more than 60% of its value during the past year. It’s now valued below its original IPO price.

ESG (environmental, social and governance) is one area that has bucked the decline in overall investments compared with other categories such as those mentioned earlier — not surprising given the number of carrots and sticks being thrown at agriculture when it comes to climate and the environment. Take the billions of dollars in USDA Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities grants, or consider the implications of the enhanced ESG reporting requirements for publicly traded companies the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed. Those two items alone keep a lot of venture capital money on the table. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as ESG has become entrenched throughout corporate and consumer cultures.

Save the Farm First
This does not mean every startup that touts cleaner air, fewer burping cows and more earthworms for your soil is going to be rolling in the venture capital dough. Even the quest for utopia has its limitations.

Consumers have had to withstand double-digit inflation when it comes to food costs the past couple of years. At some point, something has to give. Spending extra on a box of cereal that sequestered an extra ounce of carbon might not be the priority now that we have $5 eggs and 8% mortgages.

One positive nugget of information when it comes to ag tech investing is movement toward supporting tech that is closer to the producer rather than the consumer. Hopefully this means less “fake meat” and doing something that truly improves farming at its core. Right now, farmers need innovation to weather the coming economic storms. Successful innovation is defined at the farm level as whether it is profitable and practical.

Venture capitalists and their entourage need to stop focusing so much on saving the world and start with the basics of how to save the modern farm. We all must remember this: A black bottom line is the goal whether it comes to planting your money in the ground or the latest ag tech startup. Once we accomplish that, we might be able to start saving the world together.

Foresight for 2022: Watch These 4 Megatrends

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 17:13:42 GMT

You have two choices. As trends change, you can adapt your farm and capitalize on the opportunities, or you can stay the course and watch your business decline. “Today is the slowest rate of change we will experience,” says Jack Uldrich, a futurist and former naval intelligence officer. “Our world is not slowing down; the pandemic unexpectedly accelerated the future by five to 10 years.” What trends will shape the next year or five? Watch these areas.

BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

In somewhat simple terms, Uldrich says, blockchain technology is a distributed digital ledger. “What it allows businesses to do is have a secure, trustworthy and transparent view of the supply chain,” he says. “With blockchain in the not-too-distant future, both consumers and businesses are going to know exactly where their crops came from, how they were grown, how they were shipped, how they were stored, etc.”

On the farm level, Uldrich says blockchain technology allows companies such as Cargill, PepsiCo and General Mills to hold farmers accountable for their production practices and resource usage.

“I know this will not sit well with all farmers,” he says. “What I’m saying is customers will work with producers who they think are doing the best in limiting their water use, reducing methane or reducing CO2 emissions, and blockchain will give them the technology to do that.”

REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE

Big food companies are betting on regenerative agriculture to thwart climate change, Uldrich says. That is translating into paying farmers to sequester carbon and adopt conservation practices.

“We’re seeing European governments be more aggressive on requiring agribusinesses and farmers to get more se-rious about regenerative agriculture, and the Biden administration will likely provide financial incentives for farmers to store carbon in their land. This is a huge opportunity for farmers; it’s not too soon for every farmer to begin getting up to speed on this issue.”

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

By 2025, electric vehicles could total $330 billion, according to consulting firm AlixPartners. Electric vehicles now represent 2% of total global vehicle sales and could be about 24% of total sales by 2030.

How many people are buying electric cars? Is battery technology improving?

“Pay attention to those trends because I think electric vehicles are going to take off faster than most farmers are currently estimating,” he says. “If so, demand for gasoline goes down, which means demand for ethanol goes down. If ethanol demand goes down, the demand for corn goes down. My point is not to say that will happen, but corn farmers should be prepared for that possibility.”

PLANT-BASED PROTEINS

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, plant-based meat sales soared to high levels.

“That had a lot of folks worried,” says Jayson Lusk, Purdue

University agricultural economist. “But, that sales growth seems to have leveled off a bit in the past few months.”

While the growth in sales has slowed, keep an eye on plant-based proteins (meat and eggs) and milk, Uldrich says: “Plant-based protein is going to begin eroding some sales of traditional meat, milk and eggs. It is not going to become 100% of the market, but I think that it’s going to grow faster than other food segments.”

Futureproof Your Farm

As a business owner, take time to think about the future, advises futurist Jack Uldrich. He offers these three ways to have an “AHA” moment about the future.

Awareness: Be aware of how fast the world is changing and what trends will affect us.

Humility: What served us well yesterday in our jobs or our industry might not be sufficient in the world of tomorrow.

Action: If your action solves the wrong problem, your efforts are worthless. Instead, ponder this question: What is the “tomorrow” problem you must begin solving today? That will help lead you to the best action.

Peanut Butter & Jelly’s Alternate Universe

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 15:18:35 GMT

There is a quote that says “the best education you’ll get is traveling.” Based on my recent travels across the pond to Europe, I would have to wholeheartedly agree. It was there on that continent, in the country of England, and in of all places on restaurant menu after restaurant menu, that I learned that the two letter acronym that I’d known my whole life to mean peanut butter — no longer means peanut butter at all. PB now stands alone without the J. The two letters that were eternally tied to JIF, Skippy and Peter Pan have now arrived in the never, never land that we now live. And in this new world of environmental consciousness and “wokeness” PB simply means “plant-based”.

First of all how boring, and slightly insulting, to know that peanut butter — the true original icon of plant-based protein — now has to share its PB acronym with the likes of tofu, fake cheeseburgers and almond milk. Putting such sarcasm aside, this is no laughing matter as the future of plant-based foods will undoubtedly determine the future look of agriculture on this planet.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no beef at all with people having the choice of a Beyond Meat burger or an Impossible meatball. In fact, in full disclosure, on my flight to London I had the choice for dinner of some suspect chicken dish or a plant-based meatballs meal made by Impossible Foods. I felt the safest bet was the fake meatballs. Pretty sure I made the right choice. Truthfully, it wasn’t bad, but given the choice I’d choose the real deal any day.

The real elephant in the room when it comes to plant-based foods is not the ingredients or the sometimes over-the-top health claims. No, it is the agenda that comes along with it. And that agenda is to promote a world where there is no choice. Animal-based agriculture has no place in this new PB world — all because cows, pigs, chickens, and all those cuddly woolly sheep are deemed much worse for the planet environmentally than an innocent chickpea plant. That’s the focus group message in a nutshell.

If saving the planet were only that simple. Despite the media hoopla, high-profile deals, and positive public karma that initially surrounded plant-based food companies like Beyond Meat and Oatly their public stock price has imploded. Not just down 20 to 30%, these two companies are down 90 to 95% from their all-time highs. Now, many of these company’s original pub-lic cheerleaders asking whether they are even worth saving.

Could it be that these new foods imitating their traditional staples — meat and milk — are suffering the same Back to the Future reality we saw happen with butter and eggs? Consumers and Julia Child always knew “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” never tasted like real butter. But we bought it because we were told butter was bad. Ironically, nutritionists eventually conceded it wasn’t as bad as originally thought. Are we really far enough along in this plant-based dietetic journey to know the long-term risks and benefits of such alternatives? Think about it. Beyond Meat has 18 different ingredients. Some of them you cannot pronounce, let alone spell. I leave you with the word methylcellulose to ponder on.

Savvy consumers also seem to be wising up to the reality that being a plant-based alternative doesn’t automatically make it the hands-down healthier choice. The latest Beyond Burger touts that it has 35% less total fat than a beef burger and overall less cholesterol. But the rest of the story is that it has that laundry list of processed ingredients to help it achieve its simulated mouthfeel, and it contains a whopping five times the amount of sodium. Let’s just put it this way — it isn’t exactly a salad equivalent.

Okay forget taste, forget the health benefits, its the environmental benefits that plant-based alternatives stand on — right? Hold your horses, it’s much more complicated than advertised. Yes, in most cases, plant-based foods generate less greenhouse gases (GHG’s) than their animal-based counterpart. Almond milk makes the bold claim that it produces 78% less GHG’s than regular milk. Never mind that it uses 20 times more water than dairy. Then go on to ignore that 80 percent of the world’s almonds are grown in California, a state in such an extreme water crisis that only New Mexico outranks it in terms of direness.

If you want to throw some shade back across the pond you have to give those in the United Kingdom some grief regarding asparagus. Turns out, asparagus in the UK has the highest carbon footprint as any other vegetable consumed in the country. The reason is mainly because most of it has to be flown in from Peru. So if you’re keen on being green — this is one green vegetable that should be taboo. That’s the problem. A healthy diet and healthy planet are sometimes at odds with each other.

If you’re thinking that the plant-based foodie movement may have had its moment in the sun, don’t for a minute think this is over. The overall public sentiment in Europe toward PB was seemingly much more promoted, accepted, and engrained than here in the U.S. Maybe, because politics and social trends no matter how misguided can still run roughshod over common sense. A perfect example of this is because of its vegan and environmental message, Oprah, Natalie Port-man and Jay-Z were part of a recent $200 million investment into Oatly. That’s a lot of star power and money behind a message whether you agree with it or not.

Be prepared for what could come next. If you can’t win market share by choice, then you have to wonder if the next step involves some serious regulatory arm-twisting. How long it will be until a European country or California bans certain animal-based products in grocery stores and restaurants? They are doing it for internal combustion cars, why would a methane producing cow be excluded? Will the USDA’s school lunch program be overhauled to exclude real meat and dairy? Then there is the issue of USDA’s quest to define commodities that are “climate-smart”. Will animal-based products start showing up on USDA’s blacklist?

All pointed questions that should keep us shaking in our boots. Common sense says animal agriculture has a place and a purpose in our lives and on this earth. Those closest to the land and the farm have known that for centuries. The question is are we up to the challenge and hard work to make sure it stays that way? We’d better be or the true meaning of PB & J will be lost forever.

PepsiCo, Beyond Meat Partner to Develop New Plant-Based Snacks

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 17:59:32 GMT

Jan 26 (Reuters) - PepsiCo Inc and Beyond Meat Inc said on Tuesday they would form a joint venture to develop and sell snacks and beverages made from plant-based protein.

Beyond Meat’s shares, which gained about 65% last year, were up 22.4% in premarket trading, while those of PepsiCo were up 1%.

Plant-based meat alternatives, such as burger patties and sausages from Beyond Meat, have gained in popularity in recent years as curious health-conscious consumers look to broaden or shift from chicken, pork and beef-based diets.

Beyond Meat suffered a surprise loss in its last reported quarter as demand for its products at restaurants and grocery stores tapered after an initial surge at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new partnership with PepsiCo will give the faux meat maker access to the beverage giant’s distribution and marketing resources and allow it to expand into new product lines, Beyond Meat Chief Executive Officer Ethan Brown said.

PepsiCo, which apart from its namesake soda owns the Lays, Quaker and Gatorade brands, has also been looking to expand its portfolio of health-focused snacks and beverages.

“Plant-based proteins represent an exciting growth opportunity for us, a new frontier in our efforts to build a more sustainable food system,” said Ram Krishnan, PepsiCo global chief commercial officer.

The financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed and the operations will be managed through a newly created entity, PLANeT Partnership LLC.

(Reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)