ProAgni Australia Podcast: Recent Episodes
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ProAgni Australia interviews experts, business leaders and livestock producers to discover the future of antibiotic free and methane reducing sustainable farming.
With $500 billion how would you design a completely new city and food system from scratch, to feed and house 3 million residents? The city of NEOM is being built on the Red Sea coast in Saudi Arabia. There are no legacy systems to deal with, no existing infrastructure that needs considering and maintaining. The city is literally rising out of the desert and you have an open book when it comes to planning sustainable food production and linking that with sustainable energy and water use. Funded by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth with an aim of 100% renewable energy and no ultilzation of ground water the project aims to be the city of the future.
Ray Moule is leading agricultural development for NEOM. His team is planning a food system to feed the cities predicted 3 million residents and 5 million visitors. Their plans include research needs, what new technologies will improve the sustainability of the food system, how to sustainably source water and nutrients for agriculture, creating circular economies, and how food systems are linked to health. He also has to balance what food to grow locally and what food to import.
With an average annual rainfall of 15-20 mm (less than 1 inch) and temperatures regularly reaching well over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) throughout the summer new production techniques and technologies are critical to developing a sustainable food system.
I recently caught up with Ray to discuss the amazing opportunity to build a food system from scratch and the challenges in doing so in a harsh desert environment. You can listen to our conversation here.
Anastasia Volkova discusses – Sustainable farming, incentives for behavioural change, and the importance of understanding the farming system when implementing regenerative agriculture.
When it comes to sustainable food production, we are all responsible.
The world forced farming to be this way because we wanted to support growth that is not sustainable.
Regrow is the infrastructure for decision support and incentive exchange in sustainable agriculture. Regrow is working with farmers and food supply chains across over 200 million acres in 45 countries to reduce the climate impact of agriculture and improve yield resistance.
I recently caught up with Anastasia Volkova, Regrow CEO and Co-Founder, to discuss the challenges, opportunities, and myths in transforming global food systems. Her deep understanding of their markets, customers, and the science guides how Regrow creates value across the whole supply chain. She explores the nuances around regenerative agriculture, which is a huge opportunity but must be applied in context. She also discussed the potential perils of limiting the sustainability conversation to carbon and overly simplifying the system. Anastasia dispels the myths that farmers are unwilling to share their data, declaring all that is needed is the right incentive.
In this conversation we explore how realistic is cheap food and the why the current impact on the global food system due to the war in Ukraine should not be a surprise to those following history. You can listen to our conversation here.
We don’t understand what it is we are eating! Our health is directly connected to the soil health in which our food is grown.
Research is showing that the nutrient composition of foods can vary over 100 times between two identical looking food items. A tomato is not a tomato and an apple is not an apple. The research is showing that the greatest determinant of nutrient density is cover cropping as part of the system. Livestock productions systems also greatly influence the nutrient composition of meat wth the quality and variability of pasture leading to an increase in nutrient density.
Eric Jackson is the Board Chair at the Bionutrient Food Association where they are studying nutrient density variability in foods and investigating what are the drivers of this variability. He is bringing the medical and agricultural communities into the same room to tackle both food sustainability and the huge burden metabolic disease is having on our societies.
I recently caught up with Eric to discuss the connections between human health, soil health, the health of the environment, and how intimately they are linked.
Joe McFadden Discusses – Collaboration, the value of existing research, innovative ways of leveraging the energy and passion of students to get the most of Cornell’s new respiratory chambers.
By Ash Sweeting
Livestock sustainability is a much more complex issue than inhibiting methane production. Holistic solutions are needed that also maintain nutrient digestibility, reduce nitrogen pollution, maintain efficiency, are scalable across different production environments in the developed and developing world and are acceptable to the public. After coming to Cornell University in 2017 solving these critical issues have become the core focus of Prof. Joe McFadden.
Cornell is building new climate-controlled respiration chambers, unique to the Unites States, to accelerate their research on livestock methane emissions. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, Joe’s team is building on research conducted over the last 50 years. His team is planning on using the new chambers to test compounds with proven in vitro methane inhibition data in live animals to determine how they work in North American production systems and other environments across the world.
Joe understand we have to invest in people first and foremost to really drive solutions. A key part of his plans are transitioning to a problems-based approach to sustainability where he is leading efforts across universities, states, and internationally to improve collaboration. To accelerate the approval process for feed additives he is collaborating with an environmental NGO and the FDA to develop new approval methodologies and he has developed a new program to educate both students and the public simultaneously.
I recently caught up with Joe to hear more about his work.
Could nature provide a map to greatly reduce the climate impact of animal agriculture. Dr Athol Klieve has spent his career researching the microbiome of ruminants and kangaroos and why ruminants produce methane and kangaroos do not. In our conversation Athol also explains how there are no identifiable patterns in nature as to why a particular species produces methane or does not produce methane and that with us humans, some of us produce methane and some of us don’t. The exciting thing is that the current situation is not fixed, things can be changed.
Athol also delves deeply into the complex community structures within the microbiome, how micro organisms cooperate with each other, how they compete, how they protect or sabotage other microbes and, how they communicate or talk to each other. He also discussed the adaptability of microbes to change their metabolism and even genetic pathways under different conditions. The ultimate focus of Athol’s research has been how to better understand these complex ecosystems to improve animal agriculture and drastically reduce livestock methane emissions.
Athol is scientific advisor at ProAgni and ProAgni is commercializing probiotics that have come from Athol’s research.
I recently caught up with Athol to hear more about his work.
The effects of antibiotic use in livestock are far greater than the human health impacts of antimicrobial resistance. It is estimated that 90% of the antibiotics given to livestock end up in the soil. Despite these antibiotics no longer being detectable in manure they still significantly impact the soil microbiome. Research shows that these antibiotics reduce the ability of the soil to capture and store carbon, and the ability of soil to respond to increased temperatures. Livestock manure and the soil are breeding grounds for antibiotic resistant microbes increasing the potential impact on human health.
Dr Carl Wepking is a soil microbial ecologist who has been studying the effects of livestock antibiotics use on the soil microbiome. His research has focused on how livestock antibiotics reduce soil microbial activity, decrease microbes’ ability to adapt to high temperatures, and decrease the soil’s ability to sequester carbon. He also found that the effects of livestock antibiotics on the soil microbiome did not require detectable levels of antibiotics in manure. Carl is at the University of Wisconsin- Madison where he is running the Grasslands 2.0 program that aims to develop sustainable livestock farming systems.
I recently caught up with Carl to hear more about his work.
Agriculture impacts climate change and climate change impacts agriculture. Dr Richard Eckard from the University of Melbourne has spent the last 20 years working on better understanding these interactions. In conversation, with Ash Sweeting, Richard discusses how today, changes in management practices can reduce livestock emissions by 10-15% and the potential for new products in development to reduce emissions by over 50%. Critical to enabling farmers to benefit from reduced emissions are the open source carbon accounting tools his team has developed, are maintaining, and deploying across industry. Richard also explores the nuances between emission reduction credit can be traded daily and a carbon sequestration credit can be traded once and then need to be maintained once it has been sold.
Interviewed by Ash Sweeting
"...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
Ash Sweeting recently caught up with Justin Webb, AgriWebb’s Co-Founder and Executive Chairman to discuss how AgriWebb is working to improve food sustainability globally.
"I believe we need to think about not only methane reduction, but also taking that and converting it into better protein"
Ass. Prof. Matthias Hess (UC Davis) as interviewed by Ash Sweeting in California.