Food Solutions that are Easier to Swallow

Droughts and fires in some major parts of the world, flooding and surging/rising seas in others. Crops face temperature fluctuations and insect migration that threaten their ability to grow in their traditional fields. All the while, growing populations need more food basics, and rising lifestyle expectations in developing nations are forcing agriculture to generate increasing access to less cost-efficient animal protein, from the land and the water. Demand for all levels of food is rising every day, putting an upward pressure on prices that severely threatens the lowest elements on the socioeconomic ladder and adds pressure to a middle class that is contracting here in the United States.

When you think of the evolution of man, it is easy to see how farming has pretty much been a haphazard sector that has taken millennia to rise to current patterns. We moved from ancient nomad-hunter-gatherer into eras of stationary growth based on sustained agricultural communities and the cities that provided the division of labor necessary to support modern society.

If you were given power to create an agricultural global “do-over,” would the system of growing and delivering food look anything like what actually exists? Would we have farm subsidies, price supports, and small farming? What would the goals be? Feed as many as we can? Provide economic support to farmers? Maximize efficiency? Maximize keeping those marginal farmers at the bottom of the food chain because they have no other hope? Complicated, huh?

But a group of Silicon Valley thinkers and entrepreneurs recently met at a food-process-oriented gathering that FastCompany.com (February 12^th) calls “ali Partovi's Partovi Porktacular.” Billionaires, techies, food industry specialists, and academics blended their thoughts to look at what the world truly needs to meet this rising demand. “‘Redesigning is very different from dismantling. ‘If you were designing America's food and ag system from scratch, you'd never end up with what we have today,’ Partovi says. But it’s what we have, which means it's the starting point. ‘What I want to figure out is, is there a way to come up with some creative ideas that are a path to the solution?’…

“‘There really are two kinds of food entrepreneurs,’ says venture capitalist Paul Matteucci, who encourages and connects food-tech upstarts through his not-for-profit, Feeding 10 Billion. ‘There are the ones that hang around Berkeley or Brooklyn, and build businesses mostly for the end consumer. Then there is a whole different group of highly technical people who are building robotics for the field, sensor-based technology, automated watering systems, new food-packaging technologies, and big-data-related inventory control to reduce waste.’ These, he says, are ‘the people who are going to solve the big problems.’”FastCompany.com

But the very thought of the nature and the cost of such macro-economic solutions might actually create a level of political destabilization as subsistence farmers find the price of what they are producing dropping to levels that make it easier to feed others but would push their earning power to oblivion. Socioeconomic polarization, between countries that can actually afford to implement such agricultural modernity and those that cannot, can make the situation worse. Add to this transition the reality that high tech solutions might not work for small farmers in the most basic cost-benefit analysis without some level of sophisticated aggregation that just might terrify uneducated micro-farmers.

Some of the answers involve genetically modified crops that can produce greater yields in difficult climatic environments, but consumer resistance to such GMOs is rising fast. Undaunted, investor dollars are beginning to pour into these technological solutions for obvious agricultural issues. “These challenges have led to significant investment dollars flooding into food-tech companies. Venture capitalists and angel investors put $103 million into agriculture technology between April 2012 and March 2013, a 150% increase from the previous year. They've also put nearly $350 million into food companies, seven times the total invested in 2008. Food businesses ‘have a different financial profile than dotcoms and software companies,’ admits Amol Deshpande, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who specializes in agriculture technology. ‘But it's also a business that is not quite as competitive, and it needs tech innovation. You are meeting a real need rather than developing more 'me too' products.’…

“In October, Monsanto laid down $930 million in cash for Climate Corp., a firm founded by a pair of former Googlers that offers farmers detailed weather monitoring, prediction, and analysis. Foodies are quick to accuse Monsanto of being the evil empire. But in that move, small farms and farmers' markets will be presented with new ways to be more efficient--without modifying the actual food we eat. And as the first successful exit for the new breed of food-tech startup, it's expected to draw more money, ideas, and energy to the movement.” FastCompany.com. How do you look at these obvious problems and the displacement that may be necessary to implement the underlying solutions?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the balance between humanity and nature sometime buys more time with technological solutions… and sometimes those solutions create new and equally complex additional problems.