🌍 Toilet training cows #03
🌍 Toilet training cows #03
Money does grow on trees, milking microorganisms, and the most sustainable milk
Hi!
Welcome to the third edition of the 'tings with impact newsletter 🌍
This week we are looking at Single Earth who are creating a stock market for nature, Formo who have developed ways to synthesise milk proteins, and a group of german scientists who have toilet trained cows.
Since this edition happens to be quite cow/milk heavy we will top it off by looking at the sustainability of various milks as a little 'ting.
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🌳 Single Earth - Money does grow on trees
Traditionally the way you get value out of a piece of land is to extract its natural resources and sell those, which is not very ecological. Natural areas such as forests do have a lot of natural resources like timber, but they also offer an invisible service that does not involve cutting down trees. This invisible service that forests, or other natural areas, have is the capturing of large amounts of CO2.
A substantial market for carbon offsets is growing as corporations and individuals seek to offset their emissions. In the previous editions of this newsletter we have covered novel methods of storing CO2 with 44.01 who are turning CO2 into rock and Heimdal who are turning oceanic CO2 into construction materials, but we also have an ancient and pretty powerful method of capturing CO2, nature!
So... who said money doesn't grow on trees... if one can sell the ability of trees to capture CO2 then it kind of does.
Single Earth are creating a quasi stock market for nature, turning carbon and biodiversity into a digital good. Founder of Single Earth Merit Valdsalu said "We reward landowners for not clearcutting their forests and not digging up their wetlands … but instead, for preserving the ecosystems that actually keep all of us alive.". By assigning a monetary value to natural land, landowners will be able to profit from doing nothing to the land and corporations will be able to purchase partial ownership of the land's ability to capture CO2.
Single Earth works directly with landowners and uses satellite data, big data analysis, and machine learning to determine when an area captures 100kg of CO2 to then emit a MERIT token to the landowner that can be sold through the Single Earth marketplace. Over time these tokens will fluctuate in price based on the change in demand and global carbon prices. Turning nature into something that fits into our capitalist societies will maybe work better to preserve nature... in the end, money speaks, and if it does grow on trees, then many childhood dreams will have come true.
🧀 Formo - Milking microorganisms to make cheese
The main topic of conversation when it comes to the future of food is the replacement of meat with more sustainable protein sources. Looking at the worst proteins based on greenhouse gas emissions, the number one spot is, not beef as I expected, but rather lamb. What is even more interesting is that the third spot on the list is held by cheese, outranking the likes of pork, farmed salmon, and chicken. Per kilogram of consumed food Lamb produces 39.2 kg of CO2 emissions, Beef produces 27 kg and Cheese produces 13.5 kg, while something like Tofu only produces 2 kg of emissions.
Creamy, funky, stretchy, oozy... all attributes of cheese... but never one's of vegan cheese. Thinking about those dense orange bricks of so called 'cheese' makes me a bit sad. I have found that the hardest alternative food product to get excited about. The milky, creamy and soft texture of mozzarella is something that I never, in a million years, thought possible to make without the use of cow (or buffalo) milk. That's where I have been proven wrong as Formo, a Berlin based alternative cheese startup, is creating cheese equivalents without the use of animal milk.
Unlike other vegan cheeses that replace the milk with other products, Formo are able to replicate the essential milk proteins used for cheese making without the need to actually milk animals. Microorganisms are given the right genetic information to instruct them to produce milk proteins (whey and casein). Similar to the beer brewing process, where yeast turns the sugars from grain into alcohol, Formo creates a fermentation environment with the right pH, temperature, and nutrients for milk protein production. Once the milk proteins have been created they get mixed with plant-based carbohydrates, fats, and salt to create the concentrate for cheese production. Then, just like in traditional cheese-making, heat or enzymes are used to coagulate the concentrate into curd. Curd is the solid 'dairy' product that is used to make many varieties of cheese.
I have yet to try their products as they are still in development, but hopefully the $50M they recently raised (13.09.21) will accelerate the development and distribution of their products, so that I can actually try it for myself rather than reading about it online and looking at their lovely marketing pictures. Here's a teaser of Formo's ricotta.
Source: Formo press kit
🐮 German Scientists - Toilet training cows
Although the development of alternative methods to create cheese like Formo is a great step, the alternative cheese industry still has a long way to go to compete with the scale of dairy cheese. In the time that it takes for new methods to scale we need to address the massive environmental impact of animal farming. Cows are the number 1 source of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in the world!
The methane produced by cow farts and poops has been talked about a lot, but cows also have the need to urinate which has its own environmental impact. Cow urine contains a compound called urea that when broken down converts to ammonia, which in turn is converted into nitrous oxide in the soil. Nitrous oxide does not only make cars go 300 times faster in the fast and furious movies but is also a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In addition to the nitrous oxide the ammonia also contaminates soil and can even seep into waterways. In Europe, around 70% of ammonia emissions come from livestock farming.
To help manage this, some crazy German scientists have figured out how to toilet train cows - faster than toilet training a toddler. They did this over 10 days in a few stages using rewards and deterrents. In the first step, the calves were put in a designated toilet area that captures their urine and rewarded with a nice snack every time they peed, establishing this area as a great place to do their business. For the second step the calves were put in the alley outside of the toilet area, the would once again get rewarded for peeing in the toilet area and would get 'punished' with a spray of water if they did it in the alley. In the last step they did the same thing as before but put the calves further away from the toilet area. After the training period, 11 out of the 16 calves were successfully toilet trained, managing to pee in the toilet area 77% of the time.
This first test proves that cows can be toilet trained, but of course at a very small scale with human involvement. The next step will be to automate the training process with a larger number of cows. The lead scientist Dr. Langbein hopes that in a few years all cows will be toilet trained.
🌍 A little 'ting
To stay with the general milkiness of this edition I did some research to see which milk was actually the most sustainable. There's no surprise that dairy milk takes the top spot as the least sustainable. Almond milk emits the fewest greenhouse gases per glass of milk, but does consume a considerable amounts of water to grow. On aggregate, soy and oat milk are the most sustainable dairy alternatives, but i'd say from a taste and not burning down the amazon rainforest perspective Oat milk takes the crown!
As Toni Petersson, CEO of Oatly, would sing: Wow No Cow!
Graph from the following BBC article based on a study from the University of Oxford
Thank you for making it to the end!
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Until next time, much love,
Pascal