Unlocking the potential of agricultural innovations, be it simple solutions or satellite-based technologies, will help prevent a drought from turning into famine and forced displacement and to reverse desertification, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today.

Speaking at the opening of the 2^nd International Seminar on Drought and Agriculture at FAO headquarters in Rome, as part of the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought celebrations, Graziano da Silva said:  “It is quite impossible to avoid a drought from happening, but we can avoid a drought turning into famine or displacement of people.”

He stressed that more than 80 percent of all damage and loss caused by drought was absorbed by farmers and agricultural sector, noting that one of the main causes of increasing hunger in the last three years was El Niño provoking severe droughts on the East African coast. 

“Every year the world loses 24 billion tons of soils, and dryland degradation reduces national domestic product in developing countries by 8 percent annually,” the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a video message recorded for the World Day. “We must urgently change such trends. Protecting and restoring land – better use it – can reduce forced migration, improve food security and spur economic growth. It can also help us to address the global climate emergency.”      

Simple solutions – great impact

The FAO Director-General emphasized that in order to cope with droughts and to reverse desertification, in addition to geospatial technologies, farmers can also benefit from very simple solutions.

In this regard, he cited the 1 million cisterns project to storage rainfall as a good example. “This is very simple. You store the rainfall water under your house making it available for drinking and for animals all year round,” he said.

Also in the Sahel region, FAO and partners are supporting the African Union to establish the Great Green Wall- Africa’s flagship initiative to combat land degradation, desertification and drought, the FAO chief said. The plan is to surround the Sahara with a wide belt of vegetation, trees and bushes in order to green and protect the agricultural landscape, preventing the desert from advancing.

“This measure is helping us to stop desertification which is one of the main reasons of growing conflict between pastoralists and farmers,” he added.

Leveraging technologies to combat drought – new WaPOR version launched

The development of innovative applications and portals in recent years can bring accessible and actionable information directly to the farmers’ hands. FAO supports countries in raising awareness and building capacity on such tools to strengthen resilient agricultural practices.

Today FAO launched a revamped version of WaPOR, an open-access database tapping near real time satellite data to monitor land and water productivity in Africa and the Near East. Data from WaPOR, initially launched in 2017, helps policy makers and farmers to make informed decisions to be better prepared for drought and increase agricultural production with less water use.

The updated version 2.0 offers better methodology and covers three additional countries with 100 metre resolution data: Iraq, Sudan and Niger. With recent additions, the total amount of countries covered by this resolution has increased from 18 to 21.

The Government of the Netherlands allocated $2.5 million for the further development of the WaPOR database and its expansion to other areas over the two-year period (2019 – 2020). 

Further technologies produced by Israel’s military (see flux for regenerative agriculture) could help immensely as this agtech company can aggregate plant and environmental data to predict and help augment the effects of desertification before they begin.  

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Cannabis is one of those new markets where everyone and his brother is racing in to make a quick buck. About 500 cannabis-related companies are listed on exchanges in countries like Canada, yet only a handful of those companies are involved in serious biotech endeavors or research. The rest of them, about 90% of those companies are selling recreational products with claims and products that lack medical or scientific backing.

Are they worth investing in? Only if you are willing to take big risks. In the early days crypto investors made millions, but the market went bust last year and well? There is still so much uncertainty there. My friends who were investing in cannabis Canada say it’s too late. The best opportunities are over. But can that be true in a very, very new market just starting to play out? Of course not. But I want to help you see a bit about where I think things are going from my perspective as both Israeli and Canadian writing on pharma/biotech and agtech for 20 years.

Canada is recreationally legal when it comes to cannabis, yet still you will have a hard time getting cannabis at a hospital or clinic there. I know, I tried when my dad was dying from cancer last fall. Yeah people are hotboxing in their cars all over the place and smoking their faces off anywhere you go (it’s legal!!!), but if you want pain relief from cancerous tumors or arthritis, good luck. You might get your hands on some “weed” through a clinic, but you will never figure out how the product, dosing and strain will make sense with your body and condition unless you have an expert by your side and are willing to experiment. I was there, with the world’s biggest expert in my pocket and it was a complete disaster. Only a handful of people in the world have experience and advice I would touch and even with that it’s still trial and error.

The medical establishment in Canada, well those who run it, are still leery of how the research angle will play out with federal and institutional funding that they aren’t investing in medical cannabis research yet. For similar reasons in the United States too. That’s why interest in cannabis has piqued so much in Israel where researchers have been studying the compounds and effects of the plant since the 60s. I was one of the first to write about Professor Raphael Mechoulam, who discovered and isolated THC and CBD decades ago. Yet Americans and Canadians with financing are saying, let’s start a company, let’s bring the money and rely on Israeli research — in medical or agriculture – to base our claims. Because let’s face it, without IP or patents or both, you don’t have much. Cannabis is easy to grow and easy to get your hands on. Where the money is exactly what Evogene, an Israeli company is about to do.

So if you aren’t going to get your hands into biomedical research in pharma or drug delivery devices and you aren’t going to be creating technologies for growing (like flux) or technologies for growing ideal strains like Evogene which I am going to talk about below, better put your money into software (SAAS), the kind of software that has helped other industries grow.

One company I am excited about from Israel that I think might be worth investing in is Evogene ((NASDAQ: EVGN) (TASE: EVGN). The company is long established as a genomics company that has worked with the largest agriculture and chemical companies in the world.

Evogene is an Israeli seed company that uses research and development to improve crop performance. The company uses plant genomics and biotechnology to create plants and biofuels that carry desirable traits such as resistance to stress or pests. Evogene is transferring genes between plants from the same family rather using transgenics, or GMOs. Seed giant Monsanto has a stake in the company now traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

One of their inventions is a mini plant, a Lilliput plant, that let’s them grow tomato plants quicker so they can cycle through desirable plant qualities faster, and weed out what they don’t want.

Evogene is taking the knowledge accumulated from modern genome research with classical farming methods, such as crossbreeding, which is used to improve the positive qualities of plants. If, for example, a particular plant thrives on salty water, this property can be enhanced by breeding this trait so that it will grow in salty soil, like that of Israel’s Negev Desert.

The same approach can be taken to cannabis. And last month it announced it will open a new subsidiary called Canonic to develop next generation medical cannabis products. Evogene issued a report that it has been evaluating the medical cannabis field for more than a year, including market evaluation, obtaining governmental approvals for its research program and the establishment of a research facility, technology assessment and initial product line planning.

Canonic’s initial activities will focus on creating improved cannabis varieties by addressing the current developmental roadblocks of yield, stability and specific metabolite composition. These development efforts will be based on the utilization of Evogene’s big data software platform, which has in the past demonstrated success in addressing similar objectives for other crops.

See presentation here PPT

Evogene says that they are looking at $13 billion cannabis market, which is expected to grow to $24 billion by 2025. Although the cannabis market is growing rapidly, it is well recognized that next generation products will need to address the current limitations of:

(i) low metabolite yield – causing high costs for patients

(ii) low variety stability – causing inconsistent products that have become unreliable as a medical treatment and

(iii) uncertainty in connecting cannabis metabolite profile to specific medical indications.

Evogene is uniquely positioned to provide a significant competitive advantage in the resolution of these development roadblocks through its software platform and its recognized capabilities as a leader in the area of plant genomics.

These products have been developed and utilized for more than a decade through multiple collaborations with world leading agritech companies such as BASF, Bayer, and Monsanto focusing on crop improvement via plant genomics and are now expected to allow Evogene’s newly established subsidiary, Canonic, to not only meet the challenges but also to accelerate the product development process through its predictive science driven approach.

Does this mean the big ag companies will dive into cannabis through Evogene? We can only hint so much.

Canonic’s current business aims to go in this direction creating three main product types, through a non-GMO approach:

(i) high metabolite yield cannabis varieties

(ii) stable varieties with consistent metabolite performance and

(iii) cannabis varieties with a unique metabolite profile tailored to specific medical indications. The indications that the company will currently address are: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), severe chronic pain and cancer.

Dr. Arnon Heyman is the new Canonic CEO.

“The field of medical cannabis fits perfectly within both our plant genomics activities and our human therapeutics activities. We have been evaluating this field and our relevant competitive advantages for over a year, and now, with the establishment of Canonic, we expect the new company to advance rapidly in executing its mission of developing next generation medical cannabis products and to create substantial value in a relatively short time,” said Ofer Haviv, Evogene President and CEO in a public statement issued to the press.

“This expectation is based largely on Evogene’s capabilities in plant genomics and computational know-how that will allow Canonic to uniquely address the major challenges in this large and rapidly growing field,” he added.

What we like about Canonic is that Evogene is already established in the market and it seems to be quietly helping the large ag players step into this potential megabusiness of cannabis with sound data and serious science behind it. That’s investable.

Want to read more about Israeli cannabis companies you can invest in?

Israel’s Cannbit recruits cannabis pioneer Raphael Mechoulam

Sodastream’s CEO moves into cannabis extracts with Seedo investment

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The Commission on Phytosanitary Measures (CPM) – the governing body of the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) – will hold its annual meeting to review the state of plant health and protection, and adopt new international standards aimed at stopping the spread of plant pests, including protocols to block devastating pests such as Xylella fastidiosa and the oriental fruit fly.

Globally, annual crop losses to plant pests are estimated to be between 20 to 40 percent of production. Plant diseases cost the global economy around $220 billion each year.

The IPPC is the only international body for setting and implementing phytosanitary standards to protect plants from pests and diseases, and ensure safe trade in plants that is recognized by the World Trade Organization SPS Agreement and governments around the world.

Companies like flux are “listening” to the plants. Even creating a technology that can bring plants back from extinction.

During its 14th session, the Commission will adopt:

· A new standard to provide guidance on improved fumigation methods to control regulated pests. This is in response to growing concerns over fumigants that can be harmful to human health and the environment.

· Diagnostics protocols that describe procedures and methods for the official diagnosis of six pests, including Xylella fastidiosa – a bacterium that has been increasingly spreading and attacking economically important crops such as olive, citrus or plum trees and grapevines – and the oriental fruit fly (Bactrocera dorsalis), which has affected trees such as avocado, banana, guava and mango in at least 65 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.

The Commission will discuss the concept of commodity and pathway standards to support the setting up of ground rules for countries to commence trade also with the aim of introducing new opportunities for developing countries.

The week-long meeting will also discuss High-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies to detect regulated pests and make recommendations for countries who choose to use HTS, which are in the early stages of development.

It will also bring together main actors of sea containers’ regulators and industry to discuss ways of reducing risks of plant pests during their transportation in sea containers.

The post Join the UN’s annual party for the plants appeared first on Green Prophet.

Calling all women in the Start-up Nation! M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture fund, announces a new competition for female-led technology startups where two teams have the chance to each win USD$2 million in funding. The Female Founders Competition was announced via a company blog post on Thursday.

The competition is Microsoft’s attempt to feed more venture capital (VC) dollars toward “high potential” female entrepreneurs. Funding will be provided through a partnership between M12 (formerly known as Microsoft Ventures), EQT Ventures, and SVB Financial Group.

“Women make up nearly 40 percent of our investment team,” according to the blog post. “These efforts are not yet reflected in our portfolio, where only about 8 percent of our founders are women.”

Interested startups must have at least one female founder and have raised less than $4 million in funding, through equity or debt financing. Applicants must present their idea in a live pitch process “as a solution that is solving a critical business problem.” Ten teams will be chosen for consideration for final awards.

“We formed M12 to make smart bets on innovative people and their ideas, and the Female Founders Competition is an extension of that mandate,” said Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of Business Development at Microsoft, in an M12 press release on the competition. “This isn’t about checking a box; it’s an opportunity to remind the VC community that investing in women is more than just good values, it’s good business.”

The competition is open across Israel, Europe, the United States, Canada and Mexico. Applications will be accepted until September 30 this year.  Find out more through M12’s press release (link here) and at the competition website (link here).

We will be watching to see if flux, the Dallas-based technology and software company built on Israeli R&D and focused on solving global food production, will be in the running. Green Prophet founder and editor-in-chief Karin Kloosterman developed Eddy, a flux tool that makes it easy for anyone to grow food anywhere. Learn more about it at the flux website (link here).

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Celebrity chef and foraging superstar René Redzepi told the New York Times on Monday that he is closing his Copenhagen restaurant Noma at the end of 2016 and resurrecting it in 2017 with a new menu and a new site in an urban farm setting. This man on a radical new mission had led a popular restaurant four times voted the best eatery in the world. So why fix what isn’t broken?

“It makes sense to have your own farm at a restaurant of this caliber,” Redzepi told the Times. He said the time is right for a “dramatic evolution” of his 12-year-old venue, which will move to an industrial site near Copenhagen’s hippie-cum-grunge Christiania neighborhood. There, amidst empty warehouses, he will rip up asphalt parking lots and truck in healthy soil to create arable land from unused lots.

The new restaurant will sit within that farm. Designed by Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels, it will also include a greenhouse roof tended to by a full-time farming staff. Marketing ploy or another example of the global trend towards locally grown food? We think this is the real deal, and a harbinger of where the food industry is leading.

Noma is known for culinary excellence built upon innovative use of local, seasonal foodstuffs. The World’s 50 Best, which compiles an annual rating of the planet’s best eateries, wrote of Noma in their 2015 review, “Dishes are in step with the seasons, such as milk curd and the first garlic of 2015; and the first green shoots of spring with a scallop marinade…what [Redzepi] does best: playing with techniques such as fermenting and pickling for creations beyond most people’s eating perceptions.”  The restaurant ranks third in this year’s list.

The chef said he wants to continue to shake things up and pursue a “reverent adherence to seasonality.”  His fall menu will focus only on dishes made from wild game and “foraged autumnal ingredients.” The new Noma will change into a seafood-only restaurant in winter. And when “the world turns green”  in spring and summer, the menu will go fully vegetarian, with most of the produce coming from its surrounding farm.

Karin Kloosterman has reported on initiatives underway in the US and Israel to introduce small farms into the cityscape, usually through increasingly efficient hydroponics, and using new technology such as Primaflor’s dry air cooling systems and operating systems like flux. Even NASA is experimenting with farming in the zero-atmosphere of outer space.

The food industry is challenged to feed a growing population, while reducing transport and waste, and mitigating regional shortages in water and phosphorus.  Noma is among the most influential restaurants of this century, perhaps its well-heeled clientele will eat up Redzepi’s message along with his meals, adding to the momentum of the local foods movement.

Image from Local Denmark

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“I think of Burning Man as the modern version of the world’s fair,” said project co-founder Ryan Hooks. “You have Google, Facebook, Elon Musk out there, and investors. It’s where all the innovators go to play. I know that people will be inspired by Isabel, and the message can disseminate from there.” The team will demonstrate how vertical (and indoor) farming uses 95% less water with no pesticides, and grows twice as fast as traditional plantings.

What’s not to love about vertical farms?  They bring fresh food production to unlikely urban settings, tap into radical advances in agri-tech (such as vertical farm operating system “flux”) and – whether climbing soaring skyscraper facades or housed within bespoke buildings – they are more photogenic than supermodel Gigi Hadid. Green Prophet’s brought you dozens of examples, each one offering up as much eye candy as belly food!

Hooks had worked for nearly a decade on food documentaries and for organizations like UNICEF, but he wanted to get more directly involved. “I was becoming more and more concerned over time that these solutions that are available aren’t being deployed as fast as they should,” he says.

Partnering with vertical farmer Eric Hager and designer Ruben Santa, the trio set up a small farm in East Bay, near San Francisco, to experiment with alternative crop production responsive to California’s water crisis. In addition to water efficiency, they also tackled alternative fertilizers and transportation impacts. They factored in global issues like climate change and biodiversity.  The conclusion was that going vertical could solve many more issues than scarce hydration.

They’ve developed and selected the systems to sustain their vertical micro-farm.  With Isabel now fully running in the East Bay facility, they are moving forward to acquire the vehicular components of the project via a crowdfunding campaign to complete construction of the Airstream greenhouse. On that trailer, beneath a plexiglas dome, kale, cucumbers and tomatoes will thrive – awaiting harvest to feed hungry audiences at Burning Man, universities and organizations around the world.

“People can come see it, get free salad, and they can ask us any questions,” said Hooks. They plan to follow up this exhibit with more modular vertical farms – affordable and more productive than what’s currently commercially available – for installation everywhere.

“We’d like to collaborate with someone like Ikea,” he says. “If Ikea can sell vertical farming systems, it would make it so affordable that more and more people can use it, and become more and more efficient.”

Check out their Indiegogo campaing (link here) to learn more about Isabel.  See your donations truly grow something.

Images from Indiegogo

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In the same space as the American agtech company flux, built on Israeli R&D to help people grow food in cities, another Israeli-founded, American-managed company is taking a stance and big investment dollars in agtech and food production.

They call it CropX.

The company announced this week that it closed its $9 million Series A financing. This is after 5 years of R&D.

The round was led by some familiar names: Finistere Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and GreenSoil Investments, and each investor in the Series A round is dedicated to agriculture technology innovations.

Israel-based OurCrowd also participated in the round given its previous investment in the company.

“Before CropX, there was no cost-effective way to control our irrigation infrastructure,” noted Mike Mills, a Missouri farmer and CropX customer. “We are now able to accurately and easily manage our irrigation and make real-time adjustments — all from a smartphone and across multiple farms and fields. CropX’s solution allows us to lower our water and energy usage.”

With drought conditions accelerating around the globe, water management has become one of the most critical issues facing the farming sector.

Driving a new era in AgAnalytics, CropX uses advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data to transform traditional farming techniques. The investment will be used to aggressively expand the CropX team and scale the company to meet the increasing need among farmers for low-cost and simplified, remote control of their irrigation, the company reports.

It will also fund new product development including controls in nutrition, plant protection, and planting and harvesting prediction.

“As a pioneer in the AgTech sector, we are always looking for promising technologies with the potential to make a meaningful difference to farmers’ profitability and sustainability,” said Arama Kukutai, co-founder and partner, Finistere Ventures. “CropX is the first retail-priced solution allowing farmers to control irrigation to minimize water use, save on farm energy, augment yield, and control fertilizer runoff, thereby improving environmental compliance.”

The CropX system automatically analyzes the exact water needs of different parts of each field based on topography, soil structure, and current moisture. Farmers download the mobile app and place three wireless sensors in the ground. These sensors continuously send soil readings to the cloud, where the patent-pending CropX software determines how to effectively irrigate different parts of the field based on pattern-recognition analysis and revolutionary algorithms.

It is not the first of its kind to come out of Israel. There are a number of smart water systems in the works that measure soil variables including Common Sensor.

Competitor Edyn, though promising and aiming at a consumer market for now, didn’t get the most impressive review from this savvy smart home user.

With CropX, designed for farmers, users self-install the system without expensive infrastructure or significant consulting input during the installation process.

“CropX is our first AgTech investment since the launch of the Farm2050 collective, which has grown significantly since its inception in late 2014,” stated Innovation Endeavors Managing Partner Dror Berman. “CropX is a leader in the digital agriculture space, helping farmers globally overcome rising irrigation challenges. We are excited to support such a fantastic team that is building the future ag tools.”

CropX’s product was developed by a team of scientists and technology experts in Israel, a global leader in water conservation technology, and New Zealand, and was validated on-farm over the past five years.

“The world is running out of water, and, therefore, food. The US drought is a growing problem that we must tackle head on. The farming industry is struggling to manage rising energy costs and restricted water supplies, while trying to decrease water waste and increase crop yields,” said CropX CEO Isaac Bentwich. “Our simple software service helps farmers easily grow more with less — and eliminates unnecessary water usage.”

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Maybe we’d have a little more tolerance and understanding in this world if ISIS just smoked some of the plants instead. Or maybe the plan is to smoke some of the spoils. Watch the video above as ISIS burns alleged cannabis plant fields in Syria.

I was in Syria 15 years ago as a tourist and didn’t see a trace of cannabis anywhere in the ultra conservative country. It could be grown for shipping the pot abroad to attractive markets nearby in Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.

A startup company I am building called flux is developing a technology that could be used to help consumers (where it’s legal) grow medical cannabis. Sign up here at flux to be updated when we launch.

Meanwhile I am going to look around for the pot hummous recipe I saw online somewhere. Oh here it is. Very appropriate for these crazy times.

Want to know more about cannabis in the Middle East? Our Israeli correspondent Miriam goes on a tour of Tikkun Olam, one of 8 licensed grow ops in Israel. Read the whole story here.

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