It’s been a longtime since I updated this blog! Over the last almost 2 years now, I’ve transitioned from being a Product Manager / Head of Product for software startups to following in both of my grandfather’s footsteps in agriculture – with the crucial difference that I’m working on sustainable agricultural systems.
I knew from day 1 that I wanted to do something different from the extractive model used in tech startups where investors and (maybe) founders get all the rewards, and all too often everyone else gets stock options that end up being worthless as often as not. So my co-founders and I decided to structure Manzanita as a Cooperative – a worker owned enterprise that is run democratically.
My co-founders and I have developed a new patent-pending process to rapidly domesticate new crops in a fraction of the time it used to take. We won a grant from the National Science Foundation to support the work, and are now in-progress on domesticating our first new crop.
This is part of a larger strategy to use the natural biodiversity of California’s wild foods to address the existential threat of agricultural collapse in a changing climate.
The problem space is not well understood by the general public, so I’ll give you some background data:
Today, due to a long list of historical factors, only 174 species are farmed commercially worldwide. All of those crops have been bred for the climate we used to have. And as we all know, the climate is changing.
Based on the latest peer-reviewed science, half of global croplands will be unsuitable for their current crops at 2°C of warming. The world is now past 1.5° and not slowing down. Peer reviewed studies are now predicting severe global food insecurity in the near future. This isn’t hypothetical. US crop failure insurance claims have increased 15% or more a year for 4 years running and we’ve already had global shortages of key crops – everything from rice to sugar to chocolate – in the last three years.
Existing crops cannot be easily adapted because of the precipitous loss of genetic diversity over the last century. That’s where we come in.
Up until now it took decades or centuries of breeding to develop wild plants into farm-ready crops. We’ve developed a new proprietary process that can do it in only 5-6 years – without genetic engineering. This will allow us to leverage the biodiversity of the 30,000 known food-bearing plants not used in agriculture to address the climate crisis.
We found opportunity where the established industry saw weeds.
Our first crop is a new plant based protein that provides essential habitat for native pollinators, improves soil, and requires less than 1% of the water per ton that soy does. We expect to begin field trials in late 2027. Plant based proteins are a $350B industry, and Soy – which is ¾ of the market – is one of the crops most impacted by climate change.
There’s more – lot’s more. We’re also working with Acorn, which was historically California’s most important crop and has been eaten all over the Northern Hemisphere. I learned about acorn from my father, who relied on it as one of his main foods while living in the woods after coming back from Vietnam. It’s a genuine superfood – a complete protein with a low glycemic index. It also tastes really, really good once it’s processed to remove the bitter tannins, and those tannins can be used in a huge range of products – from pizza boxes to wine to cancer medication. We’ve also developed and patented a feed supplement for cattle, derived from the waste tannins, that can reduce methane emissions by ~20%.
I’ve long had a habit of taking on big challenges, but this is by far the biggest. Edible Mendocino & Lake Counties Magazine recently ran a story on our work which is excellent. And, of course, there’s a lot more information on the Manzanita Cooperative blog.