How a peach turned the life of Victor Friedberg around and made him turn into a taste and soil investor
Welcome to Investing in Regenerative Agriculture. Where I interview key players in the field of regenerative agriculture, people who are scaling up the sector by bringing in new money or scaling up the practises on the ground.
This time I interviewed Victor Friedberg co-founder of FoodShot Global (www.foodshot.org) a platform catalysing food system innovation. FoodShot is an ecosystem of world-class, mission aligned venture funds, banks, corporate strategic investors, and foundations that provide equity, debt, non-dilutive capital, and industry resources.
Their first focus is on Soil 3.0
We discussed the following:
- Flavour is a system, all the focus on genetics etc. went into yield and not into nutrients and flavour.
- It is hard to imagine any future that has 10b people eating healthy and sustainably of which soil is not part of that future
- Soil isn’t only the nexus between agriculture and climate change but also between agriculture climate change and nutrition
- We have a pretty good understanding of what genes are but we don’t know how they express themselves
- Think of soil and a plant as a single organism
- Ten/twenty/thirty years from now we will look more at nutrients per acre
- We need a Global Soil Map with nutrient density
- The brands of the future are the brands who understand their brand is their supply chain
- Clean labels are key
- Chemicals for the most part have for the most part made farmers not think about systemic things
- We have to find markets for the cover crops, they need to turn into cash crops
- The interesting near term work is being done in changing from a chemical farming system to an organic farming system
- From a data poor to a data rich farming system, looking at, below ground phenotyping, micro satellites, above ground Lidar
If you are working on anything related to Soil 3.0 or know someone, more information on how to approach FoodShot and the conditions for grants and investments can be found here:
www.foodshot.org
Links:
https://s2gventures.com
Dan Barber Row 7
https://www.row7seeds.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/dining/row-7-seed-company-dan-barber.html
Almanac Investments, David Barber
https://www.almanacinsights.com
Soil3.0
http://www.foodshot.org/challenge.html
SLM partners:
http://slmpartners.com
A wish from Victor:
How do we make the invisible more visible?
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.
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