For the billions of people living on less than $5 a day the only available option with rising food prices is to buy less food. It’s easy to blame this current crisis on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, when you look at things more deeply there are bigger issues at play. The coupling of fuel price and food prices is crippling food systems for many of the world’s poorest people. On top of this are growing impact of climate change and the flow on market effects of countries locking up food and energy reserves for their own perceived national interest. 

The Hunger Project works across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America to help millions of people end their own hunger and poverty. By far the best tool available is increasing local food production. This is especially the case if these systems are growing highly nutritious indigenous crops and include small scale livestock production.

I recently caught up with Tim Prewitt, The Hunger Project’s CEO to discuss how the current spikes in food and energy prices are impacting world’s most vulnerable. He described a small regenerative farm and agribusiness in Uganda run by Fareeda, where she grows and processes pumpkins and a few other crops.

There were no neat rows with trees and other crops dispersed across the farm. The trees included cocoa, mango, and papaya. The crops included, corn, soy, okra, melon, pumpkin, and other vegetables all growing together. You could see how the plants were working together. All the waste from the farm and business were composted and returned to the soil. The farm was feeding her family and several others around her by using these techniques. She’s really proud of her work.

Fareeda’s farms show how food can be produced locally and regeneratively. It also highlights the challenges of scaling regenerative agriculture, especially given the agricultural subsidy policies that remain highly focused on the industrial production of wheat, corn, rice and sugar. You can listen to our conversation here.

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Agriwebb arguably has visibility over more head of livestock and acres of grazing and farmland than anyone else with over 20 million sheep and cattle and 125 million acres being managed through their systems.  Agriwebb is now working with their customers to reduce carbon emissions. A key aspect of Agriwebb’s success is that by becoming the trusted partner of farmers and ranchers, who are collecting large amounts of production data, they can create a digital paper trail that makes it easier to target value adding certifications such as carbon neutral beef or participate in carbon sequestration schemes. 

AgriWebb strongly believes that livestock production systems can be productive, profitable, and sustainable all at the same time. However, whilst technologies already exist that can enable these improvements the issues of who pays for these technologies, who captures the premiums and how premiums are shared, and how risk is shared across the supply chain are still significant hurdles to change.

I recently caught up with Justin Webb, AgriWebb’s Co-Founder and Executive Chairman to discuss how AgriWebb is working to improve food sustainability globally.

"...supermarkets and the retailers themselves step up to take responsibility through the supply chain. They have to be the ones making calls into the wedge of profitability ..." - Justin Webb, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Agriwebb

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Dr Matthias Hess has been spearheading the assessment of compounds and feed additives for their impact on cattle methane emissions in the United States. Matthias is a microbiologist in the department of animal science at UC Davis where he has spent the last 8 years looking into the ruminant microbiome to better understanding how these different microbes breakdown complex plant materials into smaller molecules that can be utilized by the animal.

Matthias current work is leading research focused on understanding the biochemistry of how these microbes convert plant materials into small molecules that can be utilized by the animal. A huge part of his work is looking at the production of undesirable metabolites and especially methane with the aim of finding solutions to how methane emissions can be reduced.

The exciting news is that his team is using new techniques including DNA, RNA, and protein analytics to understand the microbial processes in the rumen on a molecular level.  This is leading to a much better understanding of not just the species of bacteria, archaea, and also fungi in the rumen, but more importantly how they interact, what activates these microbes, and the intracellular communications that control what genes are switched on at any point in time.

Ultimately, as methane production is an energy inefficiency within the ruminant digestive system Matthias thinks solutions that solve the methane problem will also increase protein production. That said, because of the complexity if the rumen microbiome it is highly probable that there will be different solutions for not different production systems, grazing and fed animals, and also for different environments.

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