Studying Seasons of Agricultural Growth, Berkeley Students Grow Themselves

 

Guest post by BEACN

The Bay Area Environmentally Aware Consulting Network (BEACN) is a student-run environmental consulting firm at UC Berkeley that undertakes semester long projects with innovative and progressive clients. During the fall of 2016, we created a database of 50 crops that could be a potential “best fit” for Crop Enhancement (see our blog post here). This was our second semester partnering with Crop Enhancement and we were thrilled to begin a new project to better understand the future of pest and disease control.

This spring, we took a deeper look into the supply chain of coffee, citrus and cocoa. Analyzing and reconstructing the supply chain for countries where information was scarce required reaching out to salespeople, farmers, and other industry professionals who could give us insight into the daily operations of agrochemical distributors and other farm input suppliers. We learned that many farmers around the globe struggle with debt because of the very thin margins they make from selling their products. It begged the question: how can farmers afford to change their agrochemical inputs when the risk is so high for them?

Coffee

We began with coffee, the primary means of income for 25 million smallholder farmers in the world’s tropical regions. Many farmers have been in the industry all of their lives, inheriting their land and practices from parents and relatives. Many coffee growing communities are tightly knit and rely on the transfer of knowledge from neighbors and family members. At the same time, the agrochemical industry in this region is also particularly fierce, with Brazil being the largest consumer of agrochemicals in the world. Farmers are often susceptible to purchasing and spraying chemicals they don’t need. This harms the crop and threatens the safety of workers, communities and the environment.

Stricter environmental regulations regarding the use of agrochemicals also impose significant cost implications for farms. Many farmers are calling for effective alternatives for recently banned pesticides. While fertilizer and pesticide applications happen throughout the year, the need for pest and disease control is often higher during the rainy seasons in the winter. It was surprising to find out that each farm has its carefully chosen unique set of agrochemicals, reflecting the incredible diversity of growing conditions, knowledge and resources. Uncovering and piecing together the multitude of components allowing farm production to be profitable demonstrated the lack of standardized practices among farmers, even in the same region growing the same crop.

Citrus

In addition to coffee, we studied citrus farms. Citrus refers to a wide variety of fruits, including tangerines, oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruits. The United States, Brazil, and China lead the world in citrus production. Over the last decade, citrus farms in the southeastern United States have been hit hard by “citrus greening,” a disease spread by the Asian Citrus Psyllid. The US government has pledged an enormous amount of money in R&D costs to combat this disease, and some preventive measures are enjoying to a degree of success in California. However, there are many opportunities to work to prevent this disease before it begins.

Like much of farming in today’s mechanized world, citrus farmers rely on razor thin profit margins. As such, the trend has been towards larger and larger corporate owned farms. As a result, in places like Brazil, many of the family farmers are moving to crops with larger margins – such as sugar cane. This trend provides both benefits and costs, but we see the standardization of farming techniques by large growers as beneficial in the sense they are able to take larger risks, try new products, and disseminate more information on a wider scale.

We also conducted value studies on conventional citrus farms versus their organic counterparts. It was interesting to see the differences. Organic farms spend almost double the amount that a conventional farm will spend per acre due to increased labor costs and the lack of herbicides. But organic can often be sold for a premium. The differences between the two styles of farming offer exist with their own set of tradeoffs.

Cocoa

Another crop we dug into was cocoa. Global cocoa production relies on the aggregate yield of millions of small scale farmers throughout the tropics. Up to 90% of domestically produced cocoa in the three nations with the largest tonnage exported – Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Indonesia – is grown on farms less than three hectares in size. Smallholders in these regions generally lack access to the capital required for new technologies that reduce input costs and improve efficiency. Our study noted these trends, and further research explored how variance in production inputs contributed to associated yields on three continents.

We also examined the cyclical boom and bust nature of the cocoa industry and the factors that lead to rapid rises in production in some countries and precipitous crashes in others. In particular, one study of the pre-2000’s collapse of the Malaysian cocoa industry helped us understand the conditions under which these industries fail. The correlation between the prevalence of pests and the ability of smallholders to limit yield loss became clear, as did the reduction of yield loss as the best means to increase smallholder wellbeing and overall production. Going forward, promotion of agroforestry regimes by domestic governments appears capable of limiting the susceptibility of smallholder-sustained national industries to external and widespread threats like the cacao pod borer and black pod disease.

Conclusion

This semester’s project provided us with a realistic look into farming in agricultural regions of developing countries. Learning about the process of documenting and tracking the agricultural inputs showed us the diversity in approaches to pest and disease management as well as the systems of knowledge which influence farmers and farm owners.

 

The BEACN team this semester greatly enjoyed our time working with the amazing team at Crop Enhancement. Our team consisted of first through fourth year students, including Allegra Saggese (Project Manager), Anindit Gopalakrishnan, Elisa Chen, Garrett Parzygnot, Grace Pratt, and Sanju Anne. The majors of our team vary from statistics and economics to environmental studies and computer science, with everyone having a variety of interests and skills in the sustainability realm.

Improving our research and outreach abilities, the project provided us with a new appreciation for the highly complex and sophisticated global market of agriculture we intensely depend on. Engaging with stakeholders across the entire supply chain and learning about the methodology of technological diffusion in these geographical locations was a unique growth opportunity for the whole team and will help shape our future career paths.

Crop Enhancement Appoints VP R&D, Builds Go-To-Market Team as AgTech Materials Science Pioneer Expands Industry Focus

 

Dr. Damian Hajduk heads up R&D; Mark Russell and Eric Flora spearhead market- and field-development efforts; Marcus Meadows-Smith, Mark Phillipson, and Mary Shelman to advise on business strategy

CAMBRIDGE, MA.—June 27, 2017: Crop Enhancement Inc., an innovator of sustainable agrochemical formulations for agriculture applications, has appointed Damian A. Hajduk, Ph.D., VP of research and development. Dr. Hajduk will lead efforts to expand the range of applications for Crop Enhancement’s breakthrough technology that improves crop yields, eliminates or minimizes pesticide use, and enables precise and effective delivery of active ingredients and fertilizers. To accelerate commercialization of its technology, Crop Enhancement also has formed an advisory board and added key personnel to its team to connect with leading growers and partners in the agricultural community.

“We currently have several in-market trials underway and the results are extremely encouraging,” said Kevin Chen, Ph.D., CEO of Crop Enhancement. “These new appointments will enable us to broaden our range of applications and build instrumental relationships with a broad network of industry and business partners.”

Dr. Hajduk joins Crop Enhancement from eatsa (also known as Keenwawa), a company that develops and operates automated quick-service restaurants featuring high-protein grains such as quinoa, where he was VP of food science. Previously, Dr. Hajduk was the chief scientific officer of Landec, a manufacturer of seed treatments for agriculture, packaging technologies for the food industry, packaged vegetables and salads for retail and food service, and biopolymers for medical applications. Before that, Dr. Hajduk served in a number of scientific and leadership roles at Symyx Technologies, where he developed and applied technologies for high-throughput research to accelerate product discovery.

In addition to Dr. Hajduk, Crop Enhancement has appointed two experts from the agricultural industry to lead market- and field-development activities:

Crop Enhancement also announced the formation of a three-person advisory board to spearhead business strategy.

Crop Enhancement’s products target annual crop values in excess of $100 billion worldwide across regions that include North America, Southeast Asia, Greater China, Latin America, and Africa. To boost crop yields in these regions, Crop Enhancement has developed proprietary films and formulations that modify plant surfaces (leaves, stems, fruit, and seeds) to improve their resistance to pests and diseases, and decrease the need for harmful pesticides. Crop Enhancement’s formulations can also be applied with agricultural inputs like nutrients, fertilizers and other active ingredients, enabling farmers to precisely control their release, thereby reducing costs and increasing yield.

 

About Crop Enhancement

Crop Enhancement is a venture-backed agriculture technology corporation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded by renowned materials scientist and serial entrepreneur Dr. David Soane, Crop Enhancement is developing sustainable agrochemical formulations that employ advanced and environmentally friendly chemistry to improve crop yields, eliminate or minimize pesticide use, and enable precise and effective delivery of active ingredients and fertilizers. Visit us at www.crop-enhancement.com.

 

Media contact:

Tim Cox, ZingPR, tim@zingpr.com, 650-369-7784

We’re thrilled to announce that Crop Enhancement won the pitch competition for new materials startups at Plug and Play Tech Accelerator’s 2017 Summer Summit (held on June 7 at the Sunnyvale, CA, campus). The event concluded a 12-week accelerator program which enabled us to make valuable connections with Plug and Play’s corporate partners including some of the world’s most recognized leaders in consumer packaged goods (CPG) and applied materials science.

 

 

“The startups in our programs have amazing potential to shape our future. We connect them with corporations who can bring them to market faster. We believe Crop Enhancement will help farmers around the globe.” 

Saeed Amidi
Founder and CEO, Plug and Play Tech Center

 

 

 

It was an honor to join Plug and Play’s 2017 Spring cohort of startups and we’ll continue to support PnP as an active contributor as it grows its Food & Beverage vertical.

You can watch a short video of our winning pitch here.

 

UPDATED September 29, 2017: Crop Enhancement is featured in Plug and Play’s Disruptor League.  Check out the video here or below: