NEW TECH FOODS

Canada’s Prairies are known for producing crops like canola, pulses, sugar beets and wheat, but much of this is shipped overseas for processing, missing the chance to add more value within the country. To address this, New Harvest has launched the Cellular Agriculture Prairies Ecosystem (CAPE), a project bringing together traditional farming and the growing field of cellular agriculture. The aim is to use local crops and byproducts as ingredients for new food production methods, such as precision fermentation and cultivated meat.

In this interview, Miranda Stahn, New Harvest’s programme manager for Western Canada, and Yadira Tejeda Saldana, the organisation’s Canadian director of responsible research and innovation, explain how CAPE plans to help farmers create new income streams, make better use of agricultural sidestreams and build a strong, sustainable food innovation hub in the Prairies.

L-R: Miranda Stahn and Yadira Tejeda Saldan

To begin, could you provide an overview of New Harvest's new Cellular Agriculture Prairies Ecosystem (CAPE) and the core reasons for its inception?

CAPE was born from the need to bridge the gap between emerging technologies such as cell agriculture and the conventional agriculture sector in Canada. Canada has a strong agricultural sector. We are a leading producer of crops such as canola, peas, lentils, and soy. However, most of these are exported and processed somewhere else.

For the past few years, the government of Canada has been prioritising the development of value-added agriculture. With this in mind, CAPE strives to build the biomanufacturing and innovation ecosystem in the Prairies by leveraging agricultural resources and waste streams as potential inputs for cellular agriculture processes. We aim to create food from cells and bolster Canada’s food biomanufacturing capacity by looking at what critical ingredients and components could be derived from cellular agriculture, including technologies such as lab-grown meat and precision fermentation.

We also aim to build up the biomanufacturing and cellular agriculture research and innovation ecosystem in the Prairies by prototyping local agricultural resources as biomanufacturing inputs while building local talent development and research infrastructure. It leverages existing local competitive advantages: agricultural, manufacturing and research excellence, plus New Harvest’s field-building expertise to drive economic development and global competitiveness.

CAPE aims to leverage regional agricultural resources for biomanufacturing. How do you envision this integration benefitting both local farmers and the wider cellular agriculture industry in the long run? What challenges do you foresee in achieving this balance?

Cellular agriculture, either precision fermentation or tissue engineering-based technologies, will require the production of feedstocks at scale. These feedstocks could come from crops grown in Canada, providing alternative opportunities for farmers and processors to diversify their revenue streams.

We’ve heard from some crop processors that they sometimes need to pay to get rid of waste streams. So our goal is to explore if there is an opportunity to turn the tables and make these waste streams an alternative source of income.

On the other hand, cell ag companies will need feedstocks on a large food scale as they start to scale their production processes. Currently, ingredients such as amino acids for cultured meat can be quite expensive. So, we see an opportunity to explore how some agricultural sidestreams could be an alternative source of amino acids while allowing farmers and processors to diversify their income.

As with any new technology, several challenges could still unfold. For example, the economics of using sidestreams for food production may make it unfeasible for cell ag startups to switch to these alternatives. Our goal is to provide some evidence and identify what needs to be done so that it becomes a feasible option.

As with any new technology, the first attempts tend to be more expensive, but as the technology advances, there is an opportunity to work on cost reduction. CAPE will allow us to set the foundations for this.

From a farming perspective, I want to emphasise how CAPE intends to integrate into traditional agricultural practices. The goal is not to displace the sector, but moreso help farmers find new ways to profit from waste.

To fight climate change, we need a “portfolio” of technologies. Canada has all the right ingredients to create a more sustainable food system. It’s just a matter of connecting these different pieces so that they can all work together. We see CAPE as an opportunity to do just that.

The use of underutilised crops like sugar beets and canola byproducts is a core part of CAPE. While this aligns with sustainability goals, could there be unintended consequences on local ecosystems or the agricultural economy from shifting production focus?

CAPE aims to access these resources without disrupting the current agricultural sector or ecosystem – that's really why this project is revolutionary. We aren’t asking people to displace land or protected ecosystems for more crop growth. We are trying to find a way to work within the confines of the current sector.

Looking at canola as an example, as you brought it up specifically, only about 45% of the canola seed is oil, which the market finds valuable. The remaining 55% is processed into canola meal, which is of little value to farmers and is often sold off as animal feed. We want to help gain more value from this waste to see if anything else can be pulled before it's sold off as feed.

Canola meal is very high in protein content, something which is important for media when we are growing food using cells, so maybe we can find specific growth factors or proteins that can be used to replace some of the current media components in cellular agriculture or food biomanufacturing processes. One of the most notable ones is fetal bovine serum, which not only is very expensive but is made by taking the blood from cattle fetuses, which is ethically questionable. This is exactly what the CAPE fellowship programme will be focusing on.

Beets are another predominant and interesting crop in the southern Prairies. However, the demand for beet sugar is lukewarm as Canada has only one processor. What’s interesting, though, is that the rest of the beet, stems, leaves and all can be processed into a very nutrient-rich “beet” juice with fantastic bioindustrial potential – it's just finding what sector can most easily valorise this product. Both precision fermentation and cellular agriculture seem like leading candidates in this space.

As for other crops like pulses (peas or lentils) and wheat, they are commonly used as rotational crops in the prairies to help rejuvenate the soil after disease or several years of using canola. Because canola oil is so valuable, farmers often see these off-seasons where rotational crops are grown as jutting into their bottom line. Therefore, if we can find alternative and more lucrative uses for these crops, farmers will be more incentivised to grow them. We feel that if this is successful, we will end up with healthier, more disease-resistant soil, with richer microbiomes, as crop rotation is very good for the local ecosystem.

The concept of agricultural circularity is at the heart of CAPE’s mission. What are your thoughts on the challenges of achieving a truly circular agricultural system within cellular agriculture? Are there any areas where circularity might be difficult to achieve, and how should these challenges be addressed?

People don’t realise how heavily agriculture and energy are intertwined within Western Canada. Consumers want to package traditional oil and gas into this “neat” little package that can be mitigated. Still, the reality is, especially in regions like Canada, it is a core backbone of most sector economies.

For instance, the prairie climate hinders the adoption of clean electric vehicles and farming machinery, as extreme cold can stall or disable them. As most of Alberta and Saskatchewan’s power grids come from natural resource sources, electrification is more of a GHG-emissions transfer than a substantial reduction. Therefore, even if we increase agricultural circularity by valorising waste biomass streams or reduce cattle methane emissions by implementing optimised single-celled protein diets, GHG emissions are inevitable from heating and farm vehicles, so that will remain a challenge in the mid-term.

In addition, precision fermentation and tissue culture technologies are energy intensive, so true circularity will be challenging unless we solve the energy issue.

That being said, overall, we are seeing the parallel adoption of renewables into farming practices to offset GHG emissions. If you drive into southern Alberta, you will find several farms implementing solar technology onto their land and wind in some instances. So, it’s not the lost cause the media often presents the region as, and also a good reason why we believe the Prairies could be well suited to host the biorefineries for cell ag.

Incorporating crop-based media replacements for cell cultivation is an innovative step, but it raises the question of food versus fuel. How do you respond to concerns that focusing on biomanufacturing inputs might divert crucial resources from the food supply chain, especially in the context of a global food security crisis?

This question is always a hot topic, especially in the prairies, which already have established energy economies. In our case, it's not the debate that people want it to be.

First, it’s important to acknowledge that we are using waste; we aren’t pulling from human supply chains. And as much research is occurring in parallel on alternative and more nutrient-rich animal feed protein sources, we aren’t tapping heavily into that market. Anything that can’t be used bioindustrially can also filter back into animal feed markets.

Secondly and most profoundly, in our case, the food vs. food argument lies in our favour because all the inputs we pull for biomanufacturing go back into the food supply chain and food biomanufacturing pipeline. Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture can give us an array of food ingredients from cells versus redirecting this waste into biofuels. We aren’t just talking about lab-grown meat here, which may be a few decades out. But the reality is that many food ingredients and components, like fats, oils, vanilla, you name it, can be made from single-cell fermentation systems using yeast and E.coli, and these technologies are a lot closer to market than people realise. Therefore, this isn’t a food vs. fuel argument at all. It’s an opportunity to alleviate the impacts of the global food crisis by converting waste into highly valuable and edible products.

CAPE is receiving funding from PrairiesCan, with a portion coming from the Government of Canada. In your opinion, how sustainable is this kind of federal funding in the long term, particularly as the demand for cellular agriculture continues to grow? Should industry players be looking at alternative funding models to ensure growth and innovation?

Prairies Economic Development (PrairiesCan) is a federal funding agency in Canada. Some funding programmes in Canada rely on public-private partnerships. This means that a portion of the funding needs to come from the private sector, which also ensures economic benefit and interest from the industry.

We believe this is a good model to de-risk high-research-intensive technologies like cell ag and ensure the project's outcomes benefit the country. However, these programmes are not perfect. Sometimes, the requirements limit access to early-stage startups, benefitting only more mature companies and defeating the purpose of supporting innovation and economic growth.

More than industry players need to look for alternative funding models; we believe we need VCs and governments to rethink the way their funding models work. Each sector has its own needs. Funding a software company is not the same as funding a biotech/cell ag startup. The technology pipeline is different in terms of cost and time to reach commercialisation. For cell ag, we need more high-risk, high-reward and patient capital.

Because of this, we often see cell ag companies exploring how to apply their technology across sectors, initially focusing on the most accessible opportunity based on timing, funding availability or policy shifts – such as those triggered by regional elections. A prime example is the Canadian start-up Future Fields, which has leveraged its biomanufacturing process to produce growth factors for both biopharma and cellular agriculture. This strategy has allowed them to scale sustainably while advancing their vision of establishing cellular agriculture in Canada.

As cellular agriculture develops in Canada, there may be resistance from traditional agricultural sectors, especially those reliant on conventional farming methods. What strategies can CAPE and similar initiatives employ to engage and collaborate with these sectors rather than create opposition?

CAPE’s goal is to bridge this gap since it is not intended to compete with the current ag sector. We aim to support the ag sector by providing alternative revenue sources through valorising what could be considered waste or low-value sidestreams.

The farming community and culture are strong in the Prairies, and with CAPE, we intend to provide an opportunity for dialogue and engagement to see how other opportunities exist to collaborate, especially considering how much climate change has started to impact growers in the region.

If you are looking for a tangible example of how this worked in the past, Canada’s energy transition is a prime example that parallels some of the socio-economic and political considerations that cellular agriculture faces.

About ten years ago, the energy sector was at the precipice of change. There was a clear dichotomy between reducing global greenhouse gas emissions while still being able to provide consumers the services and luxuries they have been accustomed to without compromise. This, coupled with the narrative that clean technology was coming for traditional oil and gas jobs, drove a lot of fear both politically and socially that to drive toward net-zero, we would have to sacrifice the economic well-being of the average citizen.

However, ten years out, we can see that is not the case. Much of that has come from coaxing energy companies to incorporate clean technologies into their standard operating process and diverge their investments over time. For instance, in Alberta specifically, we know that several oil-refining processes are very steam intensive, so instead of purely creating this steam through natural gas, we are seeing these sites now generate steam through solar power. As for our long-road transport sector, we are seeing them slowly begin to integrate hydrogen fuel into their routes. This means that all of these jobs, specifically those in the trades, technologies and companies which rely on energy, are simply transitioning from fossil fuels to other renewables but still exist.

Out west, we like to contextualise this as the “energy evolution, not revolution” and I think that mantra will also stay true to much of agriculture. As with energy the reality is there will not be enough to go around globally, so lets find ways we can get more bang for our buck sort of speak, but being able to produce just as much if not more food at less intensive emissions, by integrating emerging technologies alongside those which have been the sectors cornerstone for centuries.

There’s been significant controversy regarding the ethics of cellular agriculture, particularly regarding its reliance on animal cells. How does CAPE address these ethical concerns, especially given the growing movement that seeks to reduce reliance on animal products entirely?

Most of CAPE focus is on crop-waste valorisation for food biomanufacturing in Canada. As discussed above, we are looking for alternatives to media components for cellular agriculture that are purely animal-derived like fetal bovine serum discussed above.

As for the cell lines, when we create them from animal cells, the number of cells taken from the animal is so nominal that it will not impact their well-being. It's no different than taking a small sample of human cells for a biopsy. However, CAPE acknowledges the public resistance to continuing this practice, so one of the key components of this project which hasn’t been discussed is the development of a cell bank at the University of Alberta, which will give access to the kind of cell lines individuals may want to use to derive cellular agriculture products from.

However, I think what CAPE is going to encourage people to do is expand their view of cellular agriculture. Lab-grown meat is the holy grail, but we want to expand this definition in line with the Government of Canada, which views cellular agriculture as food from cells, including products derived from precision fermentation and molecular biology, as described above.

While CAPE’s focus on talent development through fellowships is exciting, how can the project ensure that its research and innovations are accessible to a broader range of communities, including underrepresented groups in the agricultural and scientific fields?

New Harvest is passionate and has always been committed to open-sourced science. By making the intellectual property assets we create (publications, images, etc.) freely available for use, reuse, redistribution and further development, we amplify their impact. Openness fosters collaboration, discussion and reflection, all essential for driving positive change in our food system.

Therefore, in line with these beliefs, all of CAPE’s outputs, including the economic analysis, lifecycle assessments and other material derived from the project, will be publicly available and accessible to different stakeholders. A huge output of this project is developing a portal where a lot of this work will be stored and accessible to everyone. Fellows are to publish in open-sourced journals whenever possible. We strongly encourage them to disseminate their work to a broader non-technical audience during their tenure with New Harvest.

We are also working with a law firm and other academic partners on developing collaboration agreements that adopt new ways of ensuring that tangible outputs can be accessible for startups and research purposes.

The expansion of cellular agriculture is closely tied to regulatory approvals and consumer acceptance. What steps will CAPE take to ensure that the innovations coming out of this initiative will meet both government regulatory standards and consumer demands for safety and sustainability?

As part of CAPE we will work with Vireo Advisors to develop safety strategies for the inputs researchers will be developing. New Harvest has a long-standing collaboration with Vireo, the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative. With CAPE, we intend to connect this work with our Canadian ecosystem development efforts and ensure that safety continues to be a priority. We strongly believe in the concept of safety by design, which means ensuring that safety is considered from the initial steps of the development process. This includes the potential inputs that could be used in manufacturing processes, such as the ones we will develop as part of CAPE.

In addition, we will work with academic researchers at Dalhousie University to develop life cycle assessments (LCAs). Our goal is to understand the potential environmental impact of these novel supply chains and how they could integrate into different cell ag manufacturing processes.

Our end goal is that these safety strategies, LCAs and the data developed from them will be accessible to stakeholders through an online portal or database.

New Harvest's approach tends to be focused on co-creating, meaning we do our best to engage with as many stakeholders as possible to ensure our projects remain relevant to them. With CAPE, we will do the same to ensure we obtain timely feedback from stakeholders, including government officials, regulators and end users.

Given that CAPE is focusing on a region like the Canadian Prairies, what role do you see for global cooperation in scaling up cellular agriculture? Are there opportunities for international partnerships, and how might local projects like CAPE fit into a broader global food systems strategy?

For sure! We think there are several opportunities for international collaboration.

We live in an interconnected world where supply chains are highly intertwined. Canada is already well known as a global leader in safe food exports, so we want to take advantage of that reputation when developing these novel value-added supply chains for food biomanufacturing.

CAPE intends to position the Prairies as a relevant hub where local and international startups can be close to the ingredients they need for their processes.

Each country might have its strengths, and we see this opportunity to build the biorefineries of cell ag in the Prairies as one of Canada's strengths that it could provide to the global cell ag ecosystem.

We are interested in connecting with potential partners who could benefit from joining CAPE.

As more players enter the cellular agriculture space, competition is bound to increase. How does CAPE plan to differentiate itself in such a rapidly evolving industry, especially with the rise of other initiatives in Europe and the US?

We believe there is a time and space for competition, but the cell ag space is still so new and with many unknowns that there are more opportunities to collaborate rather than compete. This is especially true if we want to ensure this technology has a meaningful impact on our food system beyond just being accessible at targeted high-end restaurants.

It is great to see so many different initiatives happening around the world. That is a good sign from our perspective. This means more governments, investors and stakeholders see its potential benefits.

We saw what competition did to the space a few years ago. Companies were mostly funded by private investors, preventing them from collaborating due to strict IP policies. Several companies ended up shutting down just because their technology couldn’t work. Right now, we’re seeing how companies are coming together to tackle challenges as part of consortia or working closely with academics.