Reimagining & Building Toward a Planet-friendly Food System
Over the past century, our global food system has experienced more change than agriculture did since it first began to be practiced nearly 13,000 years ago. Recent transformations produced incredible efficiencies, increased production and lowered the costs to feed a global population that grew by five billion people over this time.
As it scaled, this food system stopped being designed to feed humans. Through broadacre cropping and corporate farming, the food system became optimised to feed livestock and satisfy our insatiable demand for animal protein. Unfortunately, animals are an inefficient protein delivery system where only about one kilogram of meat results from 10 kilograms of feed.
This inefficient system means we now have a whopping 45% of all our planet’s land devoted to supporting livestock production. This system is increasingly strangling all forms of life on our planet, from biodiversity loss to our overall climate. And by 2050, we will have another two billion mouths to feed with a rising middle class demanding more protein than ever before.
What got us here, won’t get us there. It’s time for us to pursue a Plan B with purpose and urgency to develop a more efficient, scalable and planet-friendly food system designed to feed humans-first.
From the field to the fork, from fermentation to cell agriculture and plant-based meat - our visionaries, our doers, our advocates, our idealists and our capitalists are reimagining the protein for our food system. If you are excited about the possibilities for the future of food, stop by and say hello to us at Harvest B.
Plan B for the planet will be a team effort.
