Athian (athian.ai), the world’s first cloud-based carbon marketplace for the livestock industry, announces a seed investment from Tyson
Ventures, the venture capital arm of Tyson Foods, Inc., one of the world’s largest food companies and a recognized leader in protein. This latest investment from Tyson Ventures, long with previous investments from Elanco Animal Health Incorporated (NYSE: ELAN) and
Newtrient LLC, will fast-track the launch of the first-of-its kind transactional carbon credit inset program for the livestock sector that will provide producers economic incentives for on-farm sustainability practices, while helping improve the sustainability of the food system and reduce climate warming.
“This investment from Tyson Ventures propels the development of our carbon marketplace platform forward,” said Paul Myer, CEO of Athian. “We now have investors from each segment of the livestock production value chain – farmers, packers, processors, and animal health companies – supporting sustainability practices, including the economic aspect of sustainability, which has been left out of the conversation for far too long. While no single company can solve the challenge of climate change alone, we can work together to make meaningful impacts. We will launch Athian’s carbon credit insetting platform in the second half of 2023 so that livestock farmers who prioritize measurable carbon management practices will be able to, for the first time, earn revenue to fund those practices.”
Athian’s key mission is to help the beef and dairy value chains capture and claim carbon credits earned through sustainability efforts by aggregating, validating, and certifying, greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, and monetizing those reductions through the sale of
carbon credits. Athian aggregates data for producers of all sizes through a connected carbon marketplace, allowing beef and dairy producers to monetize and capture value from sustainability efforts, such as GHG reductions. When it goes to market later this year,
Athian’s carbon credit insetting platform will allow livestock farmers who implement sustainable practices the ability to earn revenue to fund those practices.
“Our vision is to be the platform that enables the livestock industry to meet its sustainability goals by empowering producers to implement on-farm practice changes that will move the needle on climate change,” said Athian’s Myer. “Climate change presents a profound systemic challenge to the livestock industry. Athian is positioned to work with market leading companies to quantify, gain third party certification for and reward farmers for a range of sustainability practices executed at the farm level.”
Rahul Ray, Investment Lead for Tyson Ventures, will be an observer to the Athian Board of Directors in connection with this investment.
Companies and governments across the world have made commitments to decarbonization; but one of the key technologies, electrification, is still years away from being applicable to the high-horsepower, high-torque requirements of production agriculture. BJ Johnson, founder and CEO of ClearFlame Engine Technologies, has developed a technology to transform high-horsepower diesel engines to run on 100% ethanol. He joins this week to talk about ClearFlame starting as an academic exercise and accelerating into a high commercial-potential product, the economic and environmental impact of this innovation and the necessary long-term focus on net positive emissions. BJ also dives into ClearFlame’s collaboration with Beck’s Hybrids, their innovation as one tool for the overall sustainability toolbox and how he thinks about growth in the future.
ClearFlame’s research and development is located in Columbus, Indiana. Learn more here.
The Endeavor Food Industry Tour will bring founders, board members, and investors from around the world for an experiential networking event around food, beverage, and agriculture.
Endeavor has announced that the Endeavor Food Industry Tour will be held in Indianapolis from April 27-29, 2023. The event is a two-day experiential networking event for Endeavor’s network of high-growth entrepreneurs, board members, and investors from the food, beverage, and agriculture industries. The event is organized jointly by Endeavor’s Midwest and Heartland offices.
Founded in 1997, Endeavor unlocks the transformational power of entrepreneurship by selecting, supporting, and investing in the world’s top founders to help them achieve large-scale growth. Today, Endeavor’s network spans over 40 countries and supports more than 2,000
entrepreneurs, including Midwest-based founders from companies like AppHarvest, RxLightning, El Toro Marketing, Rabbit Hole Distillery, and more.
The Food Industry Tour is a highly-curated event with just 20 attendees. Founders from companies such as AcreTrader (Arkansas), Farm Fresh (Malaysia), BioElements (Chile), AdClean (Chile), and more will come to Indianapolis for the two-day event hosted around downtown. Attendees will stay at the premier Bottleworks Hotel inside a renovated Coca-Cola bottling factory. The event includes:
– Site Tours of True Essence Foods, What Chefs Want!, and High Alpha
– Networking Dinners at St. Elmo’s and Bluebeard
– Product Tasting from Rabbit Hole Distillery and Huse Culinary
Other speakers and attendees include leaders from organizations like Bacardi, AquaBounty, Bluestein Ventures, Cleveland Avenue Ventures, Wabi Capital, and more. The Endeavor Food Industry Tour is sponsored by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, the City of Louisville, Element Three, and Lisanne Dorion (Bacardi). For more information about the Endeavor Food Industry Tour, please reach out to [email protected] and visit www.endeavor.org.
Ongoing collaboration to improve the nutritional profile of soybean meal and deliver value to farmers and feed and animal protein producers showing promising results
Corteva Inc. (NYSE: CTVA), and Bunge (NYSE: BG) announced today significant advancements in the development of more nutritious soybean meal for the animal feed industry, specifically suited for poultry, swine and aqua feed. The companies have a multi-year collaboration to develop and commercialize soybean varieties that can create a potential new value stream opportunity for soybean farmers while giving feed compounders a new option to reduce their use of synthetic additives, lower costs, and shrink their carbon footprint.
Through this collaboration, Corteva is leveraging its expertise in germplasm, gene editing, and traits discovery to develop soybean varieties with greater protein content, optimized amino acid profiles, and lower levels of anti-nutritional factors. Early field trial research has confirmed Corteva’s approach to boosting protein levels and significantly increasing the proportion of the key amino acids methionine and lysine in the soybean while maintaining high field and oil yields.
“The future of food production hinges on developing new tools and technology to help farmers sustainably meet their production goals,” said Dr. Tom Greene, VP, Biotechnology, Corteva Agriscience. “Our collaboration with Bunge aligns with our commitment to sustainable innovation while supporting improved animal performance and greater value opportunities for livestock and row crop farmers. Our next step is to bring the higher-protein, enhanced-amino acid profile into a commercial soybean variety that offers the best value for soybean farmers.”
Bunge will be the exclusive processor of the oilseed as well as exclusive merchandiser of the high-value meal and oil, leveraging its deep farmer relationships and existing facilities to source the oilseed and deliver incremental value to farmers, feed compounders and animal protein producers.
Globally, sales of synthetic methionine and lysine for feed applications exceed $10 billion annually, and the market is expected to grow with underlying animal protein demand.
“As a global leader in oilseed processing, we are uniquely positioned to leverage upstream and downstream partnerships with leading and innovative industry players to unlock value for our farmers and customers. We are very pleased by the early results of this collaboration with Corteva,” said Kaleb Belzer, VP of Protein Ingredients at Bunge. “Naturally over-expressing methionine and lysine will make soybean meal an even better ingredient for our feed customers, enabling them to significantly reduce or even eliminate the use of expensive synthetic additives and to cut the carbon emissions associated with those supply chains, which is multiples larger than that of soybean meal.”
The companies expect to commercialize these soybean varieties by late this decade.
Insignum AgTech, a U.S.-based company whose technology enables a plant to use its pigment to communicate health problems, announced today that it has closed on a round of pre-seed investment funding. Investors include Ag Ventures Alliance, Countryside Angels, Elevate Ventures, and continued support from private angel investors.
Insignum AgTech creates crop traits using gene editing, a technology that is bred into seeds. As a result, growers can more clearly identify pending stress and yield-limiting factors — such as insect attack, low fertility or disease — before they become unmanageable or too costly.
“When the crops turn color, such as purple, growers can give their crops exactly what they need, when they need it, but only if the problem truly exists,” said Kyle Mohler, Founder and CEO of Insignum AgTech. “Especially now, farmers don’t have the budget to apply inputs that may or may not produce results. Farmers can have confidence that their in-season management decisions will increase yields. The simple color-coded signal helps growers improve crop heath while using sustainable precision techniques to treat only the parts of the field that are impacted.”
Mohler said the funding will be used to advance genetic development to a commercial-ready product, apply for regulatory approval from the USDA and expand field trials.
Elevate Ventures is the most active venture investor in the Great Lakes region. The firm helps high-growth startups and early-stage companies expand into high-performing, Indiana-based companies.
“There is an elegant simplicity in Insignum’s technology. Their solution leverages a plant’s own DNA pathways to create pigments so that they can communicate their issues,” said Kristin Eilenberg, an Elevate Ventures Entrepreneur-in-Residence. “Kyle and his team have already demonstrated their tenacity and resourcefulness to develop and prove the science. It will be exciting to see how they continue to create the future of their company.”
Insignum’s solutions focus on sustainability through more timely and effective responses to issues when they happen, which, Eilenberg said, Elevate Ventures found attractive when evaluating the company. In addition, Insignum has the potential to reduce growers’ reliance on costly pesticides.
Ag Ventures Alliance invests in companies that increase farm profitability. Its membership comprises more than 90% active and retired farmers. Ag Ventures Alliance members have the opportunity to invest additional capital through Countryside Angels.
“We saw a way to help farmers make better application decisions with the Insignum technology,” said Ag Ventures Alliance CEO Spencer Stensrude. “Insignum teaches each plant how to tell the farmer when it is sick, and doing this through the seed makes it so scalable.”
Co-investor Purdue Ventures invested $100,000 in Insignum AgTech in 2022 through the Ag-Celerator fund, operated with assistance from the Purdue College of Agriculture, the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization and the agricultural industry.
Purdue Ventures manages multiple pools of capital in collaboration with the Purdue University entrepreneurial ecosystem and local corporations, enabling Purdue startups to improve the world.
Worldwide, an estimated 20-40% of crop yield is lost to pests and diseases every year. Coupled with a growing desire to reduce environmental impact in crop protection and you’ve got a growing opportunity for innovation. From a central Indiana farm to Purdue University and then onto Scotland, InsignumAgtech founder and CEO, Kyle Mohler, joins us to talk stress detection in crops using his tech-enabled solution that taps into a plant’s visible natural pigments that signal a problem is coming. He also talks about farmer’s love for the tangibility of what Insignum offers, enabling responsiveness to whatever nature throws in their path and help boost yields while also being more sustainable. Kyle and Mitch also talk about making sense of on-farm data and Insignum integrating into existing systems. They wrap up with what’s ahead for InsignumAgtech including expanding partnerships.
Change and uncertainty are continuous challenges for senior leaders – wherever their responsibilities lie within the value chain. Through the help of an exceptional Steering Committee, Purdue University and Wells Fargo Food and Agribusiness partner to bring the right issues and senior leaders to the table for critical industry discussions at the Purdue Food and Agribusiness Executive Summit.
Summit participants will explore the challenges facing our food and agribusiness industry and examine options for a strategic response. The engagement with industry and academic thought leaders attendees experience during the summit allows them to brainstorm new strategies and leave invigorated to take action. Attendees will also experience the cross-pollination of ideas across industry segments, as well as an unprecedented opportunity to build personal and professional relationships.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
This summit brings together business leaders from across the value chain who are shaping today’s food and agribusiness environment. It is intended for, but not limited to: chairpersons, chief executive officers, owners, managing directors and other current and rising leaders who drive strategy and decision making in their firms. Those with significant responsibilities and considerable agri-food industry knowledge and experience are encouraged to apply.
Case studies and topical sessions are designed to engage senior leader and executive decision makers throughout the supply chain, including: input suppliers, agricultural producers, merchandisers, distributors, retailers, food service providers, financial service companies, government agencies and technology companies working in the food and agribusiness industry. Seating is limited to 50 participants. If you have further questions or are unsure if your role and responsibilities are a good fit for the summit, contact one of our Business Development Managers:
“I attended the Purdue Food and Agribusiness Executive Summit for the first time in 2019. What set the summit apart and made it so valuable was the interaction with other attendees. The case study format gave us the opportunity to discuss and learn from each other, along with hearing directly from leaders featured in the cases. The diverse viewpoints and insights from other executives were incredibly thought-provoking and broadened my perspective. I left inspired and with renewed energy for advancing innovation in the food and agribusiness sectors.”– Janet Sichterman, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Innovation, Kent Corporation
Don Lamb has been named the new Director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture (ISDA).
Lamb is the co-owner and operator of Lamb Farms Inc. in Lebanon, along with his brother and father. The farm produces popcorn, corn, soybeans and wheat. The family also owns AgRecycle, a composting and recycling business, and Lamb Farms Agronomy, which provides soil management and crop production products to surrounding farms.
Lamb is a member of the Advisory Council for the Indiana Agricultural Law Foundation. Lamb will be stepping down as Vice President of the Boone County Council and policy chair of his local Farm Bureau Board to assume his position with the ISDA.
