A conversation with Nicolas Enjalbert, CEO and Co-Founder of SeedLinked, an innovative company digitizing collaborative breeding and a seed breeder, about our current seed system, flavour and nutrients, collaborative seed research, and much more.
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Seeds, it all starts with seeds (and soil) but mostly seeds. And our current seeds system is structurally not able to grow seeds that are adaptive to local niches, weather, let alone flavour or nutrients etc., but only able to grow seeds for large large monoculture agriculture systems. But 97% of the global farmers aren’t large monoculture farmers, and 70% of our global food is grown by them. Who grows seeds for them, and how are we going to innovate and adapt there? This interview takes a deep dive into the world of collaborative seed research, about yields, nutrients and flavour? And yes, we also tackle thorny topics like GMO, CRISPR and your favourite heirloom tomato.
This episode is part of the Nutrient Density in Food series!
This series is supported by The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of The Environment, which is a private foundation with a mission to protect and conserve the natural environment. The Grantham Foundation raises awareness of urgent environmental issues and supports organizations working to find solutions. Over the last few years, the Grantham Foundation has funded an extensive portfolio of projects focused on reducing emissions and removing carbon directly from the atmosphere.
THE POTENTIAL OF COLLABORATIVE SEED RESEARCH
Connecting farmers through digital platforms can reduce seed development costs and adoption time, increasing trust and collaboration among growers.
”With digitalization, imagine if we can connect the inside, one to develop seed at a much lower cost because training and testing are the highest costs, but if you do this together, where your future customer is testing with you, then imagine the vast amount of knowledge that is generating in this innovation. You connect it, and then you use that to help any other grower find new innovation or find new seeds. So, on the one hand, you make the development of seeds cheaper and faster by just doing it with your customer, and on the other side, you use all this knowledge from the grower to help other growers find the seeds, so you drop the adoption curve. You explode the trust because a farmer trusts vastly more insight from other farmers…” – Nicolas Enjalbert
”…sitting on a platform that allows collaborative innovation and research together. And with all the features to do that, fully integrating social media, where people can talk with each other, ask questions, and interact, because seed discussion is the number one discussion that a farmer has.” – Nicolas Enjalbert
THE NEED FOR MUCH MORE INNOVATION IN LOCAL SEEDS
Nicolas tells us about a project they are working on together with a local seed company and independent breeders to develop alfalfa that can withstand corn shade.
‘’We are working on an amazing project, and I’m really excited… Back in the day, I was an alfalfa breeder, and I was working with a large seed company. I was amazed at the amazing people working in those large companies, and I was amazed that they let me play with the weird mix system, and so one of them was working with people in the USDA on developing alfalfa that could withstand corn shade, so we were planting corn, silage corn, and alfalfa all together. Obviously, the conventional variety of alfalfa was just dying because there was a lack of resources of sun, and so they were not at all suited for growing with corn. And then when you have the corn that the alfalfa takes over, it’s like a cover crop, and then you go into full-on silage of forage harvests and production system, but what we did was develop a shade tolerance alfalfa that could withstand the pressure of corn like a mixed system, so we bred a variety of alfalfa that allowed to this coexistence pressure and survived…” – Nicolas Enjalbert
”But the impact such innovation can have in ag and, in this case, in soil and erosion is tremendous. But that’s just an example of so many innovations that the mainstream has not done to carry on those innovations due to the margin financial system structure they are on and so forth.”- Nicolas Enjalbert
”I’m convinced there are 1000s of those types of micro innovations that could be really exponentially grown with some investment. And especially breeding needs… it can take seven, eight years plus and so I, sometimes wanted to dream about, what about if I have a pool of capital to invest in so many microbe breeding projects and have a pay forward mechanism where once it’s ready to come to market, then we can pay back to this fund and have kind of this fund that allow to create a system where we can invest in the future with all those micro investor developing the seed of the future.” – Nicolas Enjalbert
THE BOOM OF NEW SEED COMPANIES AND HOW TO MAKE THEM COMMERCIALLY VIABLE
Nicolas points at the emerging seed companies and their potential for growth. Small seed companies are gaining market share as consumers seek more ethical and sustainable products.
”We start to see a lot of emerging seed companies and a lot of emerging initiatives that are absolutely amazing. […] We see many small seed companies that are coming in, their market share is growing and growing. And people want to find more ethical products and ethical partners to work with. And so I believe that we need to give them the capacity to make those small seed companies profitable, because that is really one of the biggest challenges: how to make them profitable. And until we find an economic model, it’s going to be extremely hard.” – Nicolas Enjalbert
”…they are looking at different pathways to not only sell a seed, but it’s really selling a story, a novel, a full story that you can find all the way to the shelf…” – Nicolas Enjalbert
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN FLAVOUR AND NUTRIENTS
Nicolas discusses the importance of flavour in agriculture, highlighting the need for more research on nutrient density and flavour marker associations.
”Flavour is now at parity with yield in this space we are in. I mean, performance and flavour go hand in hand. And now I am trying to find partners, and I’m starting to build collaboration, but let’s look at, okay, flavour and crowdsource information. What can be a predictor of nutrient density? And so, can we crowdsource information from growers or from consumers at a fraction of the cost? What chemistry lab analysis of nutrient density information analysis could give us? But can we do a model where we can crowdsource information?’’ – Nicolas Enjalbert
”Could we look at nutrient density? And so, yeah, that’s kind of the next journey. And I’m really hoping that soon we’re going to dive into this.” – Nicolas Enjalbert
OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED
Koen and Nicolas also talked about:
- Plant breeding and genetics
- Open-source seed development and distribution
- Decentralised AI for sustainable agriculture
- Why seeds are so important
- The need of seeds that are adapted to local circumstances and changing climate
LINKS:
- SeedLinked
- Seed Savers Exchange with their program ADAPT to characterize their seed bank with more than 700 growers using SeedLinked
- Chris Smith at the Utopian Seed Project working developing new collard greens and Okra with chef and growers. A great article on the Guardian from him
- Stone Barns Center working on flavor evaluation of more than 300 varieties a year
- Dr Julie Dawson at The Seed to Kitchen Collaborative working with chef and grower to develop new locally adapted varieties.
- The Culinary Breeding Network working with the dry farming institute.
- Liveseeding project with Fibl
- Rete Semi Rurali in Italy doing a lot of flavor work
- UC Davis with Dr Barbara Blanco lab
- OSSI Open Source Seed Initiative
LINKED INTERVIEWS:
- Dan Barber, great flavour, health benefits and healthy ecosystems can only come from healthy soils not a lab
- Erwin Westers – Supermarkets didn’t care about his quality so he focussed on selling seeds to other regenerative farmers
- Armin Steuernagel on how to keep a mission driven company independent and raise capital
- Eric Smith – Commoditization is the root cause of all ecological destruction and human health impacts
- Anne Biklé and David R Montgomery – After studying more than 1000 papers the definitive answer, we are what our food ate
- Zuzanna Zielińska – Women’s hormonal health starts with regenerative agriculture and the focus on quality and nutrient density food
- Fred Provenza – What should we learn from domesticated animals when it comes to food as medicine
- Stephan van Vliet – The first randomised clinical trial comparing agro-ecological grown and supermarket food
- David LeZaks and David Strelneck – Why the USDA gave a $600K grant to figure out how to pay farmers for quality
- Erin Martin – Saving $750K by providing nutrient dense fruit and vegetables to 50 people with severe diabetes for 12 months
- Pierre Weill – After certifying the quality of over $3B of animal protein a year, now turning to vegetables
- Eric Jackson – Want to work on nutrient density? Start with animal protein
- Yasmine Cathell – Deep nutrition research on a 350 hectare commercial arable farm, everything from counting worms to sap analysis
- Mary Purdy – Why a supplement company launched a flour product
- Paul Greive – How the biggest exit in regeneration led to millions of more chickens on pasture
- Erwin Westers – Supermarkets didn’t care about his quality so he focussed on selling seeds to other regenerative farmers
- Olivier Husson – Photosynthesis is the biggest lever we have in health, climate, droughts, floods, but most plants are too sick to do it properly
- Kevin Morse – Flour, flavour and nutrients, how a back to the future mill changes everything for wheat farmers
- Tina Owens – Only 1% of nutrition data is tracked on food labels and that means lots of opportunities for companies
- Sam Kass – Get people access to carrots before talking about nutrient density, former Obama’s chef and nutrition advisor turned investor says
- Zach Ben – Breaking down centuries of oppression through indigenous baby food
- Sara Balawajder – Building Lukas Walton’s impact first food and ag portfolio
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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.