Cultivating a Crop of Food System Solutions

In its third year, the Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge is maturing just as are many winners of the annual $1 million in Seed and Growth grants as well as Seeding The Future Grand Prizes that reward their innovative approaches to solving some of the world’s biggest problems.

After receiving a total of more than 2,400 applications from startups and other organizations around the world over its first three years, the Seeding The Future Foundation has put together a global web of enterprises all striving in different creative ways toward the same goal: eradicating hunger and food insecurity and boosting human nutrition in sustainable ways worldwide.

Among the highest impacts by Challenge winners so far is the development of a new variety of arsenic-safe rice in the Philippines that is expected to eliminate unsafe consumption of arsenic-laden rice by as many as 70 million people.

In fact, this global collective of highly impactful food system solutions—consisting not only of the winners but also finalists, semifinalists, and other, shortlisted innovations—has reached the point that Bernhard van Lengerich, founder of Seeding The Future Foundation, plans to extend the Foundation’s efforts to its first physical summit, scheduled for October in Kenya in connection with the Global Bioeconomy Summit.

Several dozen participants from the Challenge will attend workshops around a select number of key food system issue clusters, network with one another, swap ideas, establish regional knowledge-sharing ecosystems, and move the world that much closer to the kinds of impactful solutions they’re all striving for.

“We want to promote and support these teams of creative innovators, scientists, and entrepreneurs and invite globally operating institutions and other large philanthropic organizations to learn more about their impactful work,” says van Lengerich, former chief science officer and vice president for technology strategy at General Mills.

Our current data already suggest that many opportunities exist to connect solution seekers with solution providers, either within or across regions.

For instance, the United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has taken note of Seeding The Future’s competition, and “we are in conversations about ways of leveraging our solution library of impactful innovations and best practices,” van Lengerich says. With the Foundation’s database, access to these solutions may prove beneficial to a number of global institutions that are interested in pursuing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those of “zero hunger” and “no poverty.”

“Our current data already suggest that many opportunities exist to connect solution seekers with solution providers, either within or across regions,” he says. “Enabling and leveraging these connections will save time to improve access to safe and nutritious food on a very broad basis.”

Van Lengerich started the Seeding The Future Foundation with the aim of recognizing and encouraging significant and high-impact innovations that benefit one or more of three intersecting domains: safe and nutritious food for a healthy diet; sustainable, regenerative practices; and affordable, equitable, and appealing solutions that are trusted by consumers.

Annually, up to two Seeding The Future Grand Prizes of $250,000 each are awarded to organizations that have demonstrated their innovations are scalable and economically feasible with compelling benefits for consumers and the environment.

As many as three Growth Grant winners each receive $100,000 for demonstrating their innovation is doable and projecting both scalability and high-impact potential. The Foundation also awards $25,000 Seed Grants to enterprises that have planted and nurtured high-potential innovative ideas and demonstrated their feasibility; there are eight Seed Grant winners this year.

One way the Challenge is maturing is that solutions from winners, finalists, and semifinalists have advanced in their approaches and have also begun clustering into a number of highly relevant and recognizable buckets. That tells van Lengerich that both needs and innovations in those areas are particularly important to help solving food insecurity.

For example, innovations related to school feeding programs have emerged as an important area. “Particularly, smaller and rural communities in developing regions are creating novel solutions to enable equitable access to safe and nutritious food by combining school gardening and indigenous, sustainable agriculture with school feeding programs,” van Lengerich says.

“Many of these innovations focus on teaching how to grow food and how to eat right,” he continues. “At the same time, children develop an appreciation at an early age for the value of food and the negative implications of wasting it. There is much to learn from these innovations, and the learnings aren’t limited to developing regions.”

Another example is the increased harnessing of solar energy for crop and food preservation, storage, and transportation, which has become a robust cottage industry in much of the Global South.

“We’ve seen really exciting and innovative projects again this year using solar power to reduce postharvest losses and make solar power available for smallholder farmers,” van Lengerich says, “including building centralized units in co-op models where farmers can rent refrigerated storage—or bringing mobile units to their farms.”

And third, biology-based crop protection and fertilization, as well as biofortification, have been recognized as a central theme of many organizations’ efforts, including “replacing chemical pesticides and fertilizers with natural compounds to eliminate the dependency on more expensive chemical pesticides and fertilizers,” van Lengerich says.

“From the many hundreds of applications we see every year, it’s become very clear that costs for chemical crop protection or fertilizers are putting at risk the livelihood of smallholder farmers. They must innovate to find more affordable solutions. The same is the case for food fortification where the addition of commercially available vitamins or micronutrients are either complemented or replaced by biofortification approaches.”

Another notable characteristic of the Challenge applications in the first three years has been that a majority of them have come from startups, nongovernmental organizations, universities, and other organizations in the Global South, over the North. The applications received for the North have tended to come from for-profit entities in the United States and Europe, concerning specific innovations, while more community-oriented organizations or social enterprises, presenting more integrated solutions, have characterized applications from the Global South.

The collective effort involved in selecting grant winners is significant and ranged from dozens of subject-matter experts made up of volunteers from IFT to selection committees consisting of many of the world’s foremost experts in their fields.

SEEDING THE FUTURE GRAND PRIZE WINNERS

International Food Policy Research Institute

Malnutrition of its children is perhaps the biggest challenge facing countries in Southwest Africa. Millions of these children are in school feeding programs nearly every day. One obvious solution to the problem of childhood malnutrition is improving the nutritional content of these meals.

While the problem long has been identified, it is taking organizations like the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to recognize, develop, and deploy potential resolutions—especially at scales that will make for a significant improvement.

IFPRI has developed a program it calls HarvestPlus that develops nutrient-dense porridges for school meal programs in Zambia using biofortified traditional food crops, with the benefit of being farmed and produced by women as additional contributions to the regions’ meager household incomes.

“Biofortification is a complementary mechanism to address micronutrient deficiencies that industrial fortification and even supplements—which in many regions are too expensive—can’t satisfy,” says Katharina Diehl, a scaling specialist with the HarvestPlus program. “The idea was to use available biofortified crops and create a flour formula that is tasty and nutritious as an optional product for schools.”

IFPRI’s approach has been to add enough vitamin A and beta-carotene to maize, a staple crop in that region, to turn the porridge orange. White maize contains only 2 micrograms/gram of beta-carotene, while orange maize has 17 to 18 micrograms/gram, with a HarvestPlus target of 25 micrograms.

Eating vitamin A maize can help a child fulfill daily requirements for vitamin A, Diehl says. Plus, she says, years of research have shown that feeding schoolchildren these substances improves eyesight through physical changes in pupils and retinas.

The HarvestPlus program has diversified its fortification efforts by adding vitamin A to sweet potato porridge and zinc and iron to bean dishes. “A lot of women in this area get anemia because they get pregnant often, and the children suffer from fatigue and impaired cognition, and stuntedness,” Diehl says. “Plus these elements are important to replenish after pregnancies and breastfeeding.”

IFPRI will use the Seeding The Future Grand Prize to move its biofortified products into local commercial markets, including facilitating and de-risking this development for small food companies by doing consumer testing and presentations to government officials.

“The short-term impact is significant even already,” van Lengerich says. “Addressing nutrient deficiency for close to 90,000 schoolchildren with this innovation is truly remarkable.”

The idea was to use available biofortified crops and create a flour formula that is tasty and nutritious as an optional product for schools.

Naandi Foundation

Breaking down an approach to farming that has been practiced by hundreds of millions of farmers over eons doesn’t come easily in an India economy that is still largely agrarian, but the Naandi Foundation has been trying to do exactly that.

About 90% of India’s 200 million farmers still till less than two hectares of land, and nearly all of them use methods that rely on chemical herbicides and pesticides, which has depleted their soil. Further, the “green revolution” of decades ago prompted many Indian farmers to switch from nutrient-dense crops such as millet to rice and wheat, commodities that have tended to produce lower profits.

“The key issue from the beginning was how to come up with models to make farmers profitable, and play a role in the food system that could make a dramatic dent in the quality of life for India’s poor,” says Manoj Kumar, founding CEO of the not-for-profit Naandi Foundation, who has been working on this problem for 20 years.

What Naandi came up with is a holistic approach that relies on “biology-based solutions rather than chemical-based solutions,” as part of a regenerative agriculture approach, which also ends up offsetting carbon emissions as they are incorporated into practices by farmers.

“Farmers were used to using cow manure and spraying it and saying, ‘This is organic and this will solve everything,’” Kumar says. “But it didn’t solve anything. They needed to access the microbiome system and improve nutrition to the plant, creating more immunity. We selected best practices from around the world.”

Naandi also has been shifting farmers to multiple crops from a single crop. “Initially, yields came down, but this approach became far more profitable on a five-year framework,” Kumar says. “We’ve ended up having to become wealth managers for farmers, helping them to understand not just to put all the money in the bank but to reinvest much of it in their operations, diversifying and taking on contract farming.” In fact, Naandi has been able to push Indian farmers’ foods into new commercial markets, such as retail coffee stores in Paris, Bangalore, and Mumbai.

“This approach may well serve as a prime example for many enterprises,” van Lengerich says. “Introducing regenerative agriculture and sustainable land management and establishing a network of agricultural hubs that already affect 130,000 farmers is very effective.”

Naandi plans to use the Seeding The Future Grand Prize funds to support an 18-month initiative in Wardha, Maharashtra, partnering with and training smallholder farmers as part of its larger program. This will engage farmers from 50 new villages with knowledge to address what Naandi has called “acute agrarian distress in this region.”

The key issue … was how to come up with models to make farmers profitable and play a role in the food system that could make a dramatic dent in the quality of life for India’s poor.

GROWTH GRANT WINNERS

Kopernik

This Indonesia-based group won for its Pangan Initiative, addressing food insecurity in West Timor, Indonesia, by adopting an innovative approach that prioritizes the return to and use of indigenous farming practices, food preservation technologies, and a circular economy initiative utilizing black soldier flies to convert organic and food waste into animal feed and compost for farming.

“This began with our recognition that one of the main health challenges in West Timor is stunting of children due to malnutrition,” says Gumilang Andika, associate program manager with Kopernik, a not-for-profit R&D lab in Indonesia that works to promote social and environmental change. “The province with the highest rate of stunting demonstrated the lowest access to nutrition and sanitation and clean water.”

Beginning with a water filter project there, the Pangan Initiative evolved to help local farmers plant more nutritive crops than the rice that was typical. They started with moringa, a superfood crop that’s packed with nutrients, but local culinary practices discouraged that idea.

“So we took more of a bottom-up approach,” Andika recalls, “and learned what were their local foods that were high in nutrients and available around them.” The Pangan Initiative also introduced farmers to the use of black soldier flies to produce wastes that could be used as fertilizer.

In all, Kopernik ended up with a holistic approach that it is spreading throughout the region by means of cookbooks, engagement of community members, and training of more smallholder farmers. Public service announcements on local radio stations are next, with the goal of reaching more than 20,000 farmers.

“The beauty of this innovation,” van Lengerich says, “is that it is an approach that can be scaled across the region way beyond Timor with significant impact on people’s health and the environment.”

Kopernik plans to apply its Growth Grant in its communications efforts, which also will include participatory educational workshops for farmers, nutrition-sensitive education of parents to help prevent stunting, and distribution of cookbooks featuring local cuisine. The grant also will help fund solar-drying technology and other techniques to strengthen regenerative farming practices, including dissemination of the insights that Kopernik gains.

We took more of a bottom-up approach and learned what were their local foods that were high in nutrients and available around them.

Association 3535

This enterprise was a Seed Grant winner in 2021, the inaugural year of the Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge, and the project development studio for green and social impacts, based in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, has expanded its solar services initiative substantially since then.

Under a program it calls Cool Lion, Association 3535 has established four solar cooling hubs in sub-Saharan Africa and offers cold storage as a service to smallholder farmers and fishermen. By installing large cold-storage refrigerated containers and stand-alone cooling systems that are attachable to existing storehouses, Association 3535 provides these customers with the ability to keep their products fresh, reducing postharvest losses and increasing food security and potential income.

Association 3535 is reaching more than 150,000 farmers this way and reducing carbon emissions and food waste on farms in the region. Yet there’s something more Cool Lion brings.

“While the technology itself is no longer in its infancy, the selection committee members were truly impressed not only by the significant impact the project already is having, but by the dedication, enthusiasm, and passion the Cool Lion team has demonstrated,” van Lengerich says.

Nurture Posterity International

This 2022 Seed Grant winner based in Montreal, Canada, has an eye on food challenges in Africa because its managing director, Ibrahim Kasujja, is a native of Uganda who graduated from McGill University in Toronto.

Nurture Posterity International developed and makes nutritious and affordable composite flours for use in school feeding programs in Kasujja’s native country. Maize porridge and beans have dominated these programs, he says, but they’re nutrient-sparse. So Kasujja turned to another common crop in Uganda—pumpkins—to find a solution in their seeds, which contain omega-3 fatty acids and other healthy fats, magnesium, zinc, antioxidants, and other nutrients.

“Pumpkins are used locally but as a vegetable or accompaniment to local dishes, not as a main food,” Kasujja explains. “Transforming [seeds] into flour is an additional hurdle, because most farmers don’t do that.”

Kasujja created a composite flour prototype, called NutriPosh, that has a nine-to-one ratio of maize to pumpkin flour and took it to local schools, where cooks said it improved product performance, and nutrition researchers found that it helped the body mass index of schoolchildren in Kampala.

In addition to spreading the new porridge through Uganda schools, Kasujja has been building a supply chain among local smallholder farmers for more pumpkin seeds, involving regenerative agriculture practices that also will sequester carbon and help their crops survive climate change.

Nurture Posterity International also foresees solar-powered equipment drying pumpkin seeds in volume for flour. “This will require very large solar panels,” Kasujja says. “But we will be able to supply something like 3,000 schools and six million kids in the next five years.”

The organization plans to use the Growth Grant to buy milling equipment for mass production of the flour and for scaling of distribution of the flour to more districts in Uganda. All of this scaling up will require not only the Growth Grant but also about $500,000 in other capital. But NutriPosh is the kind of initiative that especially fulfills one important consideration in the Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge.

“It is great to see that NutriPosh has built ‘consumer feedback’ into their program to ensure the schoolchildren like their product and trust it, and it works well,” van Lengerich says. “Nurture Posterity International created products that children love to eat and that are projected to improve nutrition and learning ability of over 10 million schoolchildren in the next 10 years. We are proud that the Seeding The Future award helps accelerate the path to significant impact.”ft

We will be able to supply something like 3,000 schools and six million kids in the next five years.