One thing that makes this trickier is that the big names in plant breeding also have access to CRISPR. I started working for a major international seed company in 2012, and CRISPR was already a...
Exemplary
One thing that makes this trickier is that the big names in plant breeding also have access to CRISPR. I started working for a major international seed company in 2012, and CRISPR was already a huge topic there by that point.
We used traditional pollination to do all our breeding (it's a no-GMO company). This means we spent a lot of time collecting wild plants, genetically sequencing them, breeding them in a controlled way to isolate and transfer specific genes, and then genetically sequencing all the progeny (many hundreds of plants) to pick out the ones with the exact right combination of genes we were looking for. I personally grew a lot of weird plants — poisonous tomatoes covered in hair, lettuce covered in spikes, celery that grew as sprawly vines across the ground, etc. — as intermediate steps in the process transferring desireable plant genes (like assorted disease resistances or climate predilections) without transferring the undesirable ones (like being poisonous or covered in spikes). This is a process is that CRISPR could help speed up.
I don't work there anymore and I don't know whether the company uses CRISPR on a commercial scale (possibly not, if they assume it will face legal complications in the future like GMO technology has), but I definitely know they were experimenting pretty heavily with it, and I imagine that all the other big seed companies were as well. That's pretty huge competition for a little startup — and it doesn't help that most of the major seed companies have also formed patent-sharing collectives (as a competitive workaround for all the insidious patent laws that Bayer/Monsanto has managed to get passed in different jurisdictions around the world), which makes it even harder for little guys to break in to the commercial framing industry. They won't be invited to the club until they can contribute meaningfully to the patent pool, and that's not easy for a small, young company.
It's not impossible, though! A small seed company can definitely upset bigger competitors in the ag industry (it's happened many times before, and I know the big players are all worried about it happening again) if it's managed cleverly. I'm not sure that the VC route is the ideal way to get there, though, since VCs tend to expect faster results than the ag industry is likely to provide. This is a business where a single crop variety can easily take 10+ years to develop, have its heyday for maybe a year or two, and then be superseded almost immediately. (Note, this is just based on my knowledge of the vegetable industry. I don't know much about orchards, grains, etc.)
...and technological fixes like vertical farms, artificial-intelligence-driven tractors, and less resource-intensive meat substitutes forged from plants or animal cells have struggled in the marketplace.
I found this part kind of funny. CRISPR is not like these other things. Some of those, like AI tractors, are solutions in search of a problem (something I have ranted about before) and some, like vertical farming, are downright laughable (something I will happily rant about here if anyone cares to read it but, if not, just know that vertical farming defies some principles of physics and economics).
CRISPR can absolutely be used in equally silly ways, and I have no doubt that VCs will jump at the silliest ones (silly ideas like these practically exist to convince starry-eyed VCs to fork over their cash), but it can genuinely help solve some pretty hard problems as well. If this company's founders are smart, they'll toy around with seedless blackberries or whatever to placate their investors, but they'll pour the bulk of their resources into the "boring" problems that farmers actually ask for.
Oh woah, those sound like freaky sci-fi, lol. My experience with agriculture is limited to watering the tomatoes and lettuce in the backyard so this sounds really far out. Were there any that...
I personally grew a lot of weird plants — poisonous tomatoes covered in hair, lettuce covered in spikes, celery that grew as sprawly vines across the ground, etc.
Oh woah, those sound like freaky sci-fi, lol. My experience with agriculture is limited to watering the tomatoes and lettuce in the backyard so this sounds really far out. Were there any that ended up unexpectedly good or was everything other than the intended goal an alien-looking failure?
I'm also curious about the vertical farms. I haven't heard much about them recently, and while I can think of a few issues off the top of my head, would doing it hydroponically not work? Or is it a case of theoretically possible, but practically infeasible?
So the problem with vertical farming is that there's a limited amount of sunlight per acre, which means there's a maximum amount of sugar/calories that can be produced on a given block of land. If...
So the problem with vertical farming is that there's a limited amount of sunlight per acre, which means there's a maximum amount of sugar/calories that can be produced on a given block of land. If you're growing in natural light, vertical farming is not a space savings; you're just building an expensive structure that casts a shadow behind it, so you have to space your crop rows out more widely, and so it ends up being the same productivity per acre, just at a higher cost.
To work around this, you have to use artificial light, and that's very expensive. Your artificially-lit vertical farm is competing against thousand upon thousands of naturally-lit horizontal farms, and they're all going to be able to undercut your prices by a lot. The economics just doesn't work. Maybe you can use the vertical farming thing as a marketing gimmick and scrape by, but you're definitely not upending the industry.
There are some scenarios where vertical farming can make sense. For a backyard gardener or a restaurant or something, vertical growing a great way to take advantage of a sunlit wall, for example. Or if you're leading a country with extremely limited land, but you still want an agricultural industry as part of your defense strategy (e.g., to resist blockades), it could make sense to subsidize vertical farms. But these kinds of farms will never be economically self-sustaining on a commercial scale, and they are wholly inappropriate for VC funding. There are also very few places where this kind of investment could make sense — perhaps Singapore, for example, but definitely not a country where traditional farming is feasible. The US, as one of the top agricultural producers in the world, is a particularly silly country to try to jumpstart vertical farming in.
They're just traits you can find in the wild variants of your backyard vegetables. Domesticated plants are extremely specialized and exhibit a very limited selection of traits compared to their...
They're just traits you can find in the wild variants of your backyard vegetables. Domesticated plants are extremely specialized and exhibit a very limited selection of traits compared to their wild counterparts. For example, lettuce is in the thistle group, so wild lettuce is usually pretty spiky, and tomatoes are in the nightshade group, so wild tomatoes can contain nightshade toxins. These unpalatable traits have just been laboriously bred out of domesticated plants over hundreds or thousands of years.
The company I worked for was always looking for more obscure genetics, so whenever our resident plant collectors found a plant that looked particularly odd (like the floppy celery and the hairy tomato), they jumped all over it — because if a plant has one unusual trait, it probably has a lot more.
They particularly liked collecting from islands, deserts, hidden-away ravines, etc., because they were more likely to find isolated populations of plants there — and they spent a lot of money on funding nature preserves in countries around the world (especially countries that don't usually do much for conversation) to protect these diversity hotspots.
These collection trips were almost entirely focused on breeding more robust, weather- and disease-resistant plants, but I do remember a bit of excitement around a wild melon someone found growing in some roadside weeds because its stem turned red when the melon was ripe. It can be pretty tricky to time melon harvests correctly because the perfect harvest window is very narrow and there aren't a lot of external tells like there are with most other fruits, so a red stem would be a useful flag to the farmer. (I have no idea if this trait was successfully transferred to any melon products, since we didn't breed melons at the subsidiary where I worked.)
I for one would love a rant about why vertical farming wouldn't work commercially!
and some, like vertical farming, are downright laughable (something I will happily rant about here if anyone cares to read it but, if not, just know that vertical farming defies some principles of physics and economics).
I for one would love a rant about why vertical farming wouldn't work commercially!
...while i acknowledge that they carry some risk of unintended characteristics, i'm not opposed to GMOs on principle, just the predatory business practices they enable: intellectual property is a...
...while i acknowledge that they carry some risk of unintended characteristics, i'm not opposed to GMOs on principle, just the predatory business practices they enable: intellectual property is a sketchy-enough social paradigm on its own, but ownership claims to all progeny of a self-reproducing organism cross an untenable line...
I don't eat blackberries as much as raspberries, but they have the same tiny, crunchy seeds as everything else in that genus, right? If so, I can't wait for seedless raspberries. I mean, I'm too...
I don't eat blackberries as much as raspberries, but they have the same tiny, crunchy seeds as everything else in that genus, right? If so, I can't wait for seedless raspberries. I mean, I'm too lazy and forgetful to actually eat the produce that I buy before it expires, but I'd be excited to genuinely enjoy eating things made with raspberries instead of acting like those seeds don't feel awful between my teeth.
That’s the promise of modern genomics: introducing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems at once to the glacially slow, haphazard, one-tweak-at-a-time world of crop breeding.
Pairwise’s triple-threat berries won’t be in US groceries before 2030—even turbo-charged breeding takes time—but they could help jump-start a new agricultural revolution, a high-tech era of designer crops optimized to benefit consumers, farmers, and the Earth. The company is also working on peaches without pits, row crops resistant to a variety of diseases, fruit and nut trees that produce their first harvest within a year or two rather than three to eight, and a slew of other novel products, often in partnership with some of the world’s largest agribusinesses.
So far, the market for gene-edited food is almost entirely theoretical. Pairwise launched the first Crispr product in the US in 2023, a less bitter mustard green. It said it was discontinuing the product in early 2024 in favor of developing other gene-edited crops. Today, the company has received more than 50 regulatory approvals for five edited crops in nine countries, but it has only one creation for sale, a high-yielding blackberry variety available in limited quantities in Colombia.
[...]
But the scientists who founded Pairwise believe their product has a chance to break through because Crispr can help farmers grow healthier and more abundant food in a warming world, with significantly less deforestation, agri-chemicals, or greenhouse gas emissions. The company is already developing an enormous pipeline of new crops customized for higher yields; longer shelf life; better resistance to heat, droughts, storms, pests, or diseases; the ability to grow in different regions or seasons or soils; and various combinations of those desirable traits. It has raised more than $160 million, and ever since its short-lived experiment with non-bitter greens, it has focused on licensing its technology rather than building its own brands. It now has working partnerships with the Big Ag giants Bayer and Corteva, the food companies Mars and Sun World, and an array of universities and other research institutions.
Just as an electric vehicle doesn’t have to look like a conventional car thanks to a small engine, Crispr has the potential to transform food and farms in unexpected ways. When I visited Pairwise headquarters in Durham in May, I got to see one of the world’s first cherry bushes. Its appearance surely would have confused George Washington, but Pairwise envisions a future where it can help growers produce more fruit with less land compared to standard cherry trees, and will also make it easier to spray and harvest with machines. Pairwise chief executive officer Tom Adams told me that ordinary-looking bush could be the first step towards a more sustainable and economical form of orchard for all kinds of fruit, because the trait that got tweaked isn’t only found in cherries.
[...]
GMOs are extremely expensive to develop, which is why giant agribusinesses focusing on big commodity crops largely control them. That setup has prompted widespread complaints from farmers and grocery shoppers alike that they reduce crop diversity and limit choice.
But gene editing is much cheaper and less time-consuming, which Adams believes will make it a more accessible and democratic technology. Pairwise is working with nonprofits like the Gates Foundation and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture to develop more resilient staple crops like cowpea and cassava that can better withstand pests, diseases, and droughts. Leena Tripathi, a molecular biologist who oversees genetic innovation for IITA, is optimistic about semi-dwarf Crispr yams that will be much less labor-intensive for the African women who usually grow them.
[...]
So far, governments around the world have largely accepted Big Ag’s argument that gene editing is essentially an extremely sped-up version of conventional plant breeding and therefore doesn’t need particularly onerous regulation. Even the EU, which has restricted most GMO’s, moved last month to treat most gene-edited crops like regular ones. But regulators have been more cautious of Crispr livestock; the US Food and Drug Administration regulates edited animals as if they were drugs, and has required scientists to incinerate them after studying them.
[...]
The British startup Tropic Biosciences is bringing a non-browning banana to market, but most Crispr crops are at least a few years away. Startups will need more funding to make it to market, but those needs come as investments in ag-tech and food-tech have dropped 70 percent since peaking above $50 billion in 2021. The dip is partly due to AI sucking up all the venture capital oxygen, but it’s partly because venture capitalists feel burned by the struggles of former unicorns like plant-based burger startup Beyond Meat and indoor farming pioneer AppHarvest.
This is fascinating, I do find it funny that a seedless berry will be the future, just because that’s kinda an oxymoron. Wonder if there will be any unforeseen consequences with this one!
This is fascinating, I do find it funny that a seedless berry will be the future, just because that’s kinda an oxymoron. Wonder if there will be any unforeseen consequences with this one!
Well, seedless fruit by definition can’t really spread in the wild (like it was the fear about golden rice back then), so the only effects left could be on a) other wildlife b) human consumers,...
any unforeseen consequences
Well, seedless fruit by definition can’t really spread in the wild (like it was the fear about golden rice back then), so the only effects left could be on a) other wildlife b) human consumers, which ought to be rather easy or at least doable to check for ahead of time. Oh, and c) on the farmers who will eventually be rug-pulled into extortionate prices, of course.
Right, I meant more broadly using crispr for food modification might have some unforeseen consequences. Feels a bit like the beginning of Jurassic park, but with plants?
Right, I meant more broadly using crispr for food modification might have some unforeseen consequences. Feels a bit like the beginning of Jurassic park, but with plants?
Eh, humans have been breeding weird crops for thousands of years. Genetic sequencing and targeted edits are arguably safer than the non-GMO approach of radiation mutation breeding. As the article...
Eh, humans have been breeding weird crops for thousands of years. Genetic sequencing and targeted edits are arguably safer than the non-GMO approach of radiation mutation breeding.
As the article mentions, GMO crops have decades of science backing their safety and benefits.
One thing that makes this trickier is that the big names in plant breeding also have access to CRISPR. I started working for a major international seed company in 2012, and CRISPR was already a huge topic there by that point.
We used traditional pollination to do all our breeding (it's a no-GMO company). This means we spent a lot of time collecting wild plants, genetically sequencing them, breeding them in a controlled way to isolate and transfer specific genes, and then genetically sequencing all the progeny (many hundreds of plants) to pick out the ones with the exact right combination of genes we were looking for. I personally grew a lot of weird plants — poisonous tomatoes covered in hair, lettuce covered in spikes, celery that grew as sprawly vines across the ground, etc. — as intermediate steps in the process transferring desireable plant genes (like assorted disease resistances or climate predilections) without transferring the undesirable ones (like being poisonous or covered in spikes). This is a process is that CRISPR could help speed up.
I don't work there anymore and I don't know whether the company uses CRISPR on a commercial scale (possibly not, if they assume it will face legal complications in the future like GMO technology has), but I definitely know they were experimenting pretty heavily with it, and I imagine that all the other big seed companies were as well. That's pretty huge competition for a little startup — and it doesn't help that most of the major seed companies have also formed patent-sharing collectives (as a competitive workaround for all the insidious patent laws that Bayer/Monsanto has managed to get passed in different jurisdictions around the world), which makes it even harder for little guys to break in to the commercial framing industry. They won't be invited to the club until they can contribute meaningfully to the patent pool, and that's not easy for a small, young company.
It's not impossible, though! A small seed company can definitely upset bigger competitors in the ag industry (it's happened many times before, and I know the big players are all worried about it happening again) if it's managed cleverly. I'm not sure that the VC route is the ideal way to get there, though, since VCs tend to expect faster results than the ag industry is likely to provide. This is a business where a single crop variety can easily take 10+ years to develop, have its heyday for maybe a year or two, and then be superseded almost immediately. (Note, this is just based on my knowledge of the vegetable industry. I don't know much about orchards, grains, etc.)
I found this part kind of funny. CRISPR is not like these other things. Some of those, like AI tractors, are solutions in search of a problem (something I have ranted about before) and some, like vertical farming, are downright laughable (something I will happily rant about here if anyone cares to read it but, if not, just know that vertical farming defies some principles of physics and economics).
CRISPR can absolutely be used in equally silly ways, and I have no doubt that VCs will jump at the silliest ones (silly ideas like these practically exist to convince starry-eyed VCs to fork over their cash), but it can genuinely help solve some pretty hard problems as well. If this company's founders are smart, they'll toy around with seedless blackberries or whatever to placate their investors, but they'll pour the bulk of their resources into the "boring" problems that farmers actually ask for.
Oh woah, those sound like freaky sci-fi, lol. My experience with agriculture is limited to watering the tomatoes and lettuce in the backyard so this sounds really far out. Were there any that ended up unexpectedly good or was everything other than the intended goal an alien-looking failure?
I'm also curious about the vertical farms. I haven't heard much about them recently, and while I can think of a few issues off the top of my head, would doing it hydroponically not work? Or is it a case of theoretically possible, but practically infeasible?
So the problem with vertical farming is that there's a limited amount of sunlight per acre, which means there's a maximum amount of sugar/calories that can be produced on a given block of land. If you're growing in natural light, vertical farming is not a space savings; you're just building an expensive structure that casts a shadow behind it, so you have to space your crop rows out more widely, and so it ends up being the same productivity per acre, just at a higher cost.
To work around this, you have to use artificial light, and that's very expensive. Your artificially-lit vertical farm is competing against thousand upon thousands of naturally-lit horizontal farms, and they're all going to be able to undercut your prices by a lot. The economics just doesn't work. Maybe you can use the vertical farming thing as a marketing gimmick and scrape by, but you're definitely not upending the industry.
There are some scenarios where vertical farming can make sense. For a backyard gardener or a restaurant or something, vertical growing a great way to take advantage of a sunlit wall, for example. Or if you're leading a country with extremely limited land, but you still want an agricultural industry as part of your defense strategy (e.g., to resist blockades), it could make sense to subsidize vertical farms. But these kinds of farms will never be economically self-sustaining on a commercial scale, and they are wholly inappropriate for VC funding. There are also very few places where this kind of investment could make sense — perhaps Singapore, for example, but definitely not a country where traditional farming is feasible. The US, as one of the top agricultural producers in the world, is a particularly silly country to try to jumpstart vertical farming in.
They're just traits you can find in the wild variants of your backyard vegetables. Domesticated plants are extremely specialized and exhibit a very limited selection of traits compared to their wild counterparts. For example, lettuce is in the thistle group, so wild lettuce is usually pretty spiky, and tomatoes are in the nightshade group, so wild tomatoes can contain nightshade toxins. These unpalatable traits have just been laboriously bred out of domesticated plants over hundreds or thousands of years.
The company I worked for was always looking for more obscure genetics, so whenever our resident plant collectors found a plant that looked particularly odd (like the floppy celery and the hairy tomato), they jumped all over it — because if a plant has one unusual trait, it probably has a lot more.
They particularly liked collecting from islands, deserts, hidden-away ravines, etc., because they were more likely to find isolated populations of plants there — and they spent a lot of money on funding nature preserves in countries around the world (especially countries that don't usually do much for conversation) to protect these diversity hotspots.
These collection trips were almost entirely focused on breeding more robust, weather- and disease-resistant plants, but I do remember a bit of excitement around a wild melon someone found growing in some roadside weeds because its stem turned red when the melon was ripe. It can be pretty tricky to time melon harvests correctly because the perfect harvest window is very narrow and there aren't a lot of external tells like there are with most other fruits, so a red stem would be a useful flag to the farmer. (I have no idea if this trait was successfully transferred to any melon products, since we didn't breed melons at the subsidiary where I worked.)
I for one would love a rant about why vertical farming wouldn't work commercially!
Sure thing, check out my reply to BigBadWolf! (I did tone down the ranting-ness.)
...while i acknowledge that they carry some risk of unintended characteristics, i'm not opposed to GMOs on principle, just the predatory business practices they enable: intellectual property is a sketchy-enough social paradigm on its own, but ownership claims to all progeny of a self-reproducing organism cross an untenable line...
I don't eat blackberries as much as raspberries, but they have the same tiny, crunchy seeds as everything else in that genus, right? If so, I can't wait for seedless raspberries. I mean, I'm too lazy and forgetful to actually eat the produce that I buy before it expires, but I'd be excited to genuinely enjoy eating things made with raspberries instead of acting like those seeds don't feel awful between my teeth.
https://archive.is/CDTOy
From the article:
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This is fascinating, I do find it funny that a seedless berry will be the future, just because that’s kinda an oxymoron. Wonder if there will be any unforeseen consequences with this one!
Well, seedless fruit by definition can’t really spread in the wild (like it was the fear about golden rice back then), so the only effects left could be on a) other wildlife b) human consumers, which ought to be rather easy or at least doable to check for ahead of time. Oh, and c) on the farmers who will eventually be rug-pulled into extortionate prices, of course.
Right, I meant more broadly using crispr for food modification might have some unforeseen consequences. Feels a bit like the beginning of Jurassic park, but with plants?
Eh, humans have been breeding weird crops for thousands of years. Genetic sequencing and targeted edits are arguably safer than the non-GMO approach of radiation mutation breeding.
As the article mentions, GMO crops have decades of science backing their safety and benefits.