The company’s protein is made using a fermentation platform which uses an e-methanol liquid feedstock, made using a combination of hydrogen, CO2, and renewable energy, rather than sugar.
The fermentation platform, suggests Farmless, could one day be used to produce carbohydrates, fats, minerals and vitamins ‘from the bottom up.’
“We believe this technology has the potential to end factory farming, rewild our planet and draw down gigatons of carbon,” said Adnan Oner, Farmless’ founder and CEO.
There is no land but the land
Farmless’ main concern is cutting out the significant waste involved in animal agriculture, which takes up most agricultural land and is the driver behind much of the world’s deforestation.
“Animal agriculture is extremely wasteful,” Pepijn Vloemans, head of communications at Farmless, told FoodNavigator. Not only does it take up a lot of our land, but it is highly inefficient at providing nutrients.
“Meat provides a minority of our calories and nutrients, but animal agriculture eats up about three-quarters of our agricultural land.
“The reason is that a) plants are not good at converting sunlight into biomass and b) most animals are not efficient in converting biomass into edible proteins.”
Vloemans is optimistic, however, that the problems can be solved. “Turns out there’s another way to produce proteins,” he told us.
“We can use solar power to convert sunlight, CO2 and hydrogen into a liquid feedstock and then use microbes to ferment this feedstock into a wide range of edible products: essentially power-to-food.
“Using off-the-shelf solar panels we estimate that our technology is ±500 times more efficient in terms of land use compared to beef.”
So how it is ‘carbon negative’, meaning the production process offsets more carbon than it contributes to the environment? “Our feedstock is methanol, which can be made with hydrogen + CO2 from the atmosphere,” Vloemans told us. “This feedstock is converted by our microbes into food, which is made out of the CO2 from the air. So we want people to literally eat ‘pie from the sky'”.
Ready for a storm
As well as taking up far less land space than animal agriculture, Farmless’ method also has another benefit – it can work in spite of extreme