Welcome back to Global Signals, your monthly update of groundbreaking developments in the world of Agritech. In this issue, we look at honey from honey ants, crop-free protein production and (of course) there’s a robot story in there.
We’ve designed this newsletter to kickstart exciting conversations around the future of agriculture in New Zealand and beyond.
The confirmation of antimicrobial properties in honey produced by Australian honeypot ants could signal a future avenue for developing new treatments against bacterial and fungal infections. Even at low concentrations, honeypot ant honey showed effectiveness against well-known pathogens (including Staphylococcus aureus) and certain against some species of fungi.
The next challenge is to identify the active compounds in this honey which may one day be the basis of new drugs or treatments.
Indigenous Australians have used this honey to treat minor ailments for centuries - it’s just recently that the compounds responsible for its healing properties have been understood.
Is there a faster way we can test and assess both traditional and non-traditional foods for these miracle compounds once we know what they are?
US-based Pivot Bio have demonstrated that using nitrogen-fixing microbes can reduce fertiliser-related emissions. These microbes, when added to crops can take nitrogen from the air and fix it in soil as nitrates, a compound plants can use.
Creating this new microbe relies on gene editing, and the results are staggering. Estimates from PivotBio suggest that reductions of synthetic nitrogen applied to crops by up to 25 percent may be possible without affecting yields.
The science community continues to show example after example of the financial and environmental benefits of gene editing. Is reducing the negative environmental effects of farming the catalyst NZ needs to reconsider its stance on this set of technologies?
Jooules, a Kiwi start-up from the 2023 Sprout Agritech accelerator, focuses on sustainable protein production out of thin air - hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
They aim to decouple protein production from crops to address the challenge of feeding a growing global population. Today, humanity consumes many hundreds of millions of tonnes of protein each year. By 2030 we are expected to consume 800 million tonnes, and double that again by 2050. Being able to generate that amount of protein is a significant challenge, but presents a fantastic opportunity for companies like Jooules.
When food is produced without flora or fauna, what else changes about our way of life?
Tevel's Award-Winning Flying Fruit-Picking Robots showcase a novel, but easy-to-communicate convergence of cutting-edge technology with traditional agriculture machinery.
The founder of Tevel was inspired by a documentary on farm labour, where a team of workers quit after a day because the work was too strenuous. Tevel have since attracted plenty of industry hype and funding, thanks to the combination of drones and machinery, and the ongoing labour shortages impacting growers around the world.
At first thought, drones and traditional vehicles working together in orchards sounds fanciful - but now that a prototype has been developed, seems obvious.
In Global Signals No. 8 we shared Jane McGonigal's book Imaginable: How to see the future coming. Jane now presents a free online course to introduce you to the practice of futures thinking. In this course, you’ll build your understanding of what futures thinking is and what you can do with it. You’ll master essential foresight techniques and meet some professional futurists.
This course is for anyone who wants to spot opportunities for innovation and invention faster.
We’d love to hear your feedback so we can continue to share relevant monthly reads with you.
Don’t forget to share with us any signals or interesting innovations you’ve come across so we can spread the word. We enjoy seeing NZ companies be creative, innovative and push the boundaries, it makes for insightful reading.
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