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Greentown Sector Pitch Day Highlights Solutions for Agricultural Decarbonization and Resilience

The food and agriculture industry, responsible for 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, is ripe for climatetech innovations that reduce waste and emissions and restore healthy ecosystems.

Agricultural practices routinely involve large-scale monocrop operations that negatively impact soil health and utilize unsustainable chemical practices, producing harmful waste streams. Additionally, deeply rooted social impacts exist within the current food system; 18.8 million people in the U.S., particularly those in underserved communities, live with low access to a supermarket. Clearly, there’s a tremendous opportunity to rethink and improve our entire food system to address both its negative climate and social impacts.

Challenges like this require an ecosystem-wide approach. That’s why we convene our startups, partners, and investor network four times a year for our Sector Pitch Day series, each time exploring innovation areas and opportunities present in a particular sector.

Our summer Sector Pitch Day explored two dimensions of the agriculture industry and featured pitches from Greentown startups working in each:

Resilient Food Systems

  • Skytree’s unique CO₂ filter scrubs CO₂ and water directly from the air. The captured CO₂ can later be utilized as a profitable and sustainable resource in the production of fuels, chemicals, building materials, carbon farming, and other products.
  • Promethean Power Systems has developed a thermal battery technology focused on cold-storage of perishable foods, which serves over 60,000 farmers.
  • AdaViv’s machine-vision-based solution that helps growers maximize their profits by improving crop performance and minimizing the operational costs per cycle.

Regenerative Agriculture

  • Haystack Ag’s scalable, high-accuracy soil organic carbon measurement system employs elements of spectroscopy, dry combustion, remote sensing, and automation to help drive affordable regenerative farming practices.
  • Gaia AI uses drones, LiDAR, and computer vision to collect high-quality biomass data in forests, helping landowners, project developers, and investors understand the carbon stock and timber content of their land.
  • Moonshot Compost collects and consolidates food waste for composting from businesses and residents, with a focus on data creation and management.
  • Lignium Energy transforms cow manure into combustion pellets, generating a certified and odorless product with high-calorific power that complies with all necessary regulations.

In addition to sessions focused on these topic areas, we were honored to have Renee J. Robins, Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT, join us as a keynote speaker.

“Food systems are one of the key drivers of climate change, and without rapid and dramatic transformation, they will accelerate our path to a climate crisis,” Robins said. “Such system transformations require targeted research to identify, develop, and implement effective and scalable technologies, policies, and practices that will help make our food systems more resilient to climate change, as well as being a source of climate solutions.”

Check out all of our startups that are developing agricultural solutions here!

Upcoming Sector Pitch Days will focus on transportation, electricity, and buildings. Interested in attending? Reach out to us at hello@greentownlabs.com