If the world wants to feed 10 billion people in 2050, it’ll need to find a better way to grow food.
Today, about half the world’s habitable land is devoted to agriculture, yet even that amount can’t provide everyone with the sort of diet enjoyed by people in developed countries. If everyone wanted to eat like Americans, we’d need to farm about 140% of the world’s habitable land.
That’s obviously not possible. The other option is to radically boost the amount of food that each acre of land can produce. While agriculture has made impressive strides over the last several decades, tripling production seems like a stretch. One solution is to skip the soil and grow crops hydroponically in greenhouses.
Hydroponic agriculture has a lot of potential — yields for lettuce, for example, can be 10 times higher than traditional farming — but it’s not without its problems. For one, it requires a lot of energy. But that’s relatively easy to solve compared with the industry’s other challenges.
“It’s a bit of a dirty secret that the industry doesn’t really like to talk about, but they have very bad disease outbreaks,” said Paul Rutten, founder and CEO of Concert Bio, a microbiome company focusing on the space.
If the wrong bacteria or fungi get inside a hydroponic greenhouse, “it’s open season — it will just take over the whole thing,” Rutten said. “It’s one big interconnected water loop, so it doesn’t go badly wrong — it goes catastrophically wrong. Everything will just die, basically.”
Rutten and his colleagues at Concert Bio are developing a system to monitor and eventually tweak the microbial ecosystem that lives within hydroponic systems. The team has landed a $1.7 million oversubscribed pre-seed round led by The Venture Collective with strategic investments from Nucleus Capital, Ponderosa Ventures, TET Ventures, Day One Ventures and Possible Ventures. A handful of angels also contributed.
The microbiome space has seen plenty of investment in recent years. Rutten, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, decided not to start with the human body in part because of the complexity of the system. Even traditional agriculture was too complex, he said.
“This is really like the very shallow end of the pool,” Rutten said. “Because all hydroponics needs is its own water — you’ve got one water loop that connects all the plants. So instead of soil, where you could take 100 samples of that farm and there will still be many niches that you hadn’t explored, you take one sample of that water and you’ve sampled the [entire] farm, which makes our job so much easier.”
Currently, the company is collecting microbe samples from hydroponic greenhouses across the U.K. and the Netherlands and sequencing the resulting genomes to get a picture of what’s growing inside healthy systems. Once it has a handle on that, the next step will be to start selling its own probiotics to help growers address any deficiencies.
“The probiotics, at least to begin with, will probably be a more traditional pricing model where you pay per kilogram,” Rutten said. “But where we see this going over time is it’s one subscription service to have your microbiome monitored and optimized, and that includes whatever monitoring and probiotics are required.”
After it’s happy with its business in hydroponics, Rutten said Concert Bio won’t make the leap into traditional agriculture. Instead, the company will investigate on-land aquaculture.
“Their problem description is very, very similar. And you can use the same techniques that you use in hydroponics to solve the problem in a fish farm,” he said.
The seed round announced today will get Concert Bio’s sequencing efforts up and running, and Rutten thinks the company can break even on that side within six to 12 months. After that, they’ll start tackling what they set out to do — managing disease outbreaks in hydroponic greenhouses so that growers can start ramping up their yields. Once growers start to see the benefit there, he thinks they’ll quickly sign up for their optimization service.
“The idea has never been to make serious money from the data collection,” Rutten said. “Telling someone you have a problem is never going to be as valuable as being able to prevent that problem. And the prevention for us is in the probiotics. That’s where the really serious value is.”
