Agrisea

Agrisea is an Ocean Agriculture company. We are creating a fully sustainable food system by replacing freshwater and fertile land with the most abundant resource on the planet - seawater.

We have developed a technique to develop and grow crops in high salt conditions such as the salt soils in the Mekong Delta or coastal ocean waters. 

Agrisea was designed to solve world hunger, and has evolved into building a system that will last for decades supporting both the local ecosystem and the people who live there.
Rice feeds over 3.5 billion every day, it is culturally essential to livelihoods across the world, in particular, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. And yet, with our continued climate change, rising sea levels and finite freshwater source the production of rice is already struggling to meet demand. By 2050, the demand for rice is expected to double with rice production already using up to one third of our freshwater source.

Our cofounding team didn't want to stop there. We saw an opportunity to readily remove carbon from the atmosphere. We are developing a bacterial recruitment technology that absorbs methane, a greenhouse gas 28x worse than carbon dioxide, and processes it to produce a carbon source for the roots. Decarbonizing bacterial fertilizers!

Currently the best salt-tolerant crops can manage a maximum of 3g/l. We are developing a range of crops that can handle 10-15g/l and 32+ g/l. This completely opens a whole new opportunity for agriculture. Furthermore, our farms do not use any freshwater, no fertile land, and are actively removing methane from the air – a greenhouse gas that is 28x worse than carbon dioxide.

Agrisea’s gene-editing technique is used to amplify genes found in rice. This unique form of editing avoids any transfer of genes or excessive alteration from different species. They are simply salt-tolerant plants.

Agrisea’s technology can plant crops in countries where rainfall is only seen once a year, in deserts on the coast, and in support of all islands. Agrisea’s technology has the opportunity to fundamentally support growing nations, to create an abundance of food and an abundance of opportunity.

We serve the world.

Our technology is capable of providing a truly sustainable, reliable, environmentally-integrated source of food for the globe and we don't want to limit that. We find areas that could significantly benefit from our technology and begin finding out the best way to create that benefit.

Ultimately, we want to eradicate food insecurity which leads us to set up farms in locations that do suffer from food insecurity or are soon to suffer from food insecurity. The unfortunate reality of our freshwater situation means that the number of these locations is only increasing.

Our strategy for contentious market entry involves two key steps: the first being that we work with local varieties so the taste and cooking characteristic matches local preference. The second is to enter into discussions with local potential partners, government representatives and representative groups of the local population to best understand the cultural practices of the region.

Agrisea balances the needs of the human race with the needs of the natural world, placing both at an equal importance. 

Our farms are inherently designed to be regenerative, promote tourism, fish stocks and local ecosystem biodiversity. Our bacterial methane removes GHGs from the atmosphere, our removal of freshwater allows for local terrestrial ecosystems to thrive without drought or limitations. For coastal ecosystems, we absorb all agricultural runoff to protect the coastline from hypoxic dead zones and diminishing biodiversity. 

We can relieve islands of mainland reliance with a sustainable food source.

Currently we have groups of edited rice crops that are undergoing salt-tolerance tests in our Canadian labs. From these groups we will select particular varieties to be grown in our first marine pilot plots run in collaboration with our partners in Singapore and the Bahamas. In the Bahamas, we will be working closely with the Grand Bahama Port Authority and the Blue Action Lab to setup multiple 5x5m plots in the seawater canals near Freeport which will be monitored closely over a growing season. This will progress into a 25x25m plot on the north coast of the island.

We are also in discussions to launch a pilot in Singapore in partnership with some major organisations in the city-state, to be announced soon, and a field/land pilot in the Mekong Delta.

Although we aim to solve world hunger the problem we are tackling is salt-tolerance in crops. Many attempts have been made to create salt-tolerant crops but have lacked the appreciation that nature has always done it better and the perspective to amplify that in other crops. By studying the natural salt tolerance of marine organisms we were able to expand our understanding of salt management mechanisms and apply them to our design.

Our crops use a cutting-edge, in-house designed method to amplify the natural variants of the genes that means no timely breeding, no foreign gene introductions and a great flexibility to improve the design at a moment's notice. This level of conscious editing - where we don't edit the gene itself but rather control the when, where, how and by what triggers a gene is expressed. This change in editing will shake the agricultural world and hopefully encourage the emergence of more conscious agricultural companies to battle the damage caused by Monsanto's and other's history.

We take this a step further to grow these crops in the ocean itself. With this application we have the potential to solve world hunger while acting as a conduit for environmentally-conscious ocean-borne innovation, amplifying the ocean economy to become one of the strongest verticals in our future.

We are pre-revenue at this time so we serve zero people but are actively establishing partnerships to roll out as soon as our trails have finished.

In one year, we could directly serve 20 million people. In five years, between our land agriculture and our ocean agriculture operations we aim to serve a minimum of 1 billion people.

During our R&D we focus heavily on level of salinity and efficiency of the process, i.e. how long will it take us to develop a salt-tolerant plant from the point we receive a new variety or plant.

Once we launch, our primary metrics will be yield, biodiversity and food insecurity.

Yield - how much of a crop can we produce per hectare = space efficiency

Biodiversity - are our farms improving local ecosystem biodiversity?

Food Insecurity - are we reducing food insecurity locally, regionally, nationally and internationally?

3 people - two cofounders and our incredible, first employee!

We are a team built on passion, perseverance and perspective! All three team members have spent their lives dedicated to furthering knowledge through advanced degrees and improving the quality of life of others across the globe through personal projects - whether through biomedical research, biodiversity protection or being an active voice to improve our planet.

Our own experiences have shaped Agrisea's guiding design principle - all of our designs must be neutral or positive to the environment. We design products and systems that will last for decades, these products and systems are built to integrate into the local ecosystem, serving both the human and natural world. As individuals we are all quite different, we come from different countries, have had different upbringings, and different experiences. In essence, we do our best to represent diversity of thought and experience and hope to continue this as we grow as a team and community.

We are supported by a wide variety of experts in fields ranging from entrepreneurship to ocean conservation to the specific agricultural practices in countries like Vietnam.

Food is a very personal part of all lives throughout the world. That's why we are building a seed bank to better serve the local preferences around taste, cooking style, aesthetic of all countries we work in. We are working on Vietnamese, Japanese, North American, Indonesian, Russian, Korean and Italian varieties at this time and looking to obtain seeds for many other countries, including Kenya and Madagascar.

As the people who represent Agrisea we want to ensure all voices are heard, all people are represented, and all views are considered. To show this we wanted to include what we publicly display on our job applications, it's not a corporate statement, it's a personal invitation to anyone and everyone to be part of a community that we believe can change the world:

"This is an opportunity to have a very varied role with a real life impact. Something that we take pride in and something that can be very personal. Please bring your own character, drive, and inspiration. Agrisea is an equal opportunity community. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Developing a nurturing, diverse, and ambitious culture is at the core of Agrisea and truly makes up who we are."

We want that difference in opinion, in thought, in experience because we believe that's the only we can produce the best possible solution for everyone.

We want to be part of this program because we believe you can create companies that do good for people, profit and the planet! The triple bottom line. This is what we set out to do with Agrisea as we tackle one of the world's greatest challenges in hunger.

To have the support and guidance of impact-minded leaders and experts would be invaluable as we introduce our crops to the world for the first time through land-based agriculture and pilot plots. We want to ensure we pull on all experiences and expertise as we launch this technology so the focus of solving world hunger is achieved. A part of this will be a wide span of media coverage.

The opportunity receive grant funding as a member of this community will allow us to expand our team and reduce the risks we face. We will also be able to expand our operations, ensuring that we can operate in the places that need it most a lot sooner.

Finally, support and evaluation of a strong impact measurement practice will greatly assist our outreach and farm placement as we can be even more confident of the benefits we bring.

Human Capital - we are seeking advisors and potentially talent, especially marine engineering experts who can assist us in scaling our farm designs from the lab to pilot plots to commercial scale, and international regulatory assistance.

Financial - we are looking to develop our in-house financial systems so we can better track our accounting and forecasting for future deals/rollouts.

Regulatory Matters - ocean agriculture is the first of it's kind, which means the regulations are not clear on being able to grow rice in the oceans. In this regard, we seek advice, guidance and direct contacts with regulatory officials for launching our ocean rice farms.

Monitoring & Evaluation - by the end of this year we hope to place our farms in a wild location. When we launch these pilots we want to ensure we are protecting the ecosystem as much as possible and establishing a clear set of guidelines and metrics to assess our environmental impact.

We would love the opportunity to work with governments and NGOs around the world that are facing food insecurity as a means of being our in-country partner as we launch farms around the globe to alleviate the food insecurity being experienced.

Within MIT, we are very keen to partner with members of the MIT Engineering school, including many Professors of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering, such as Yuming Liu, Dick Yue, and Alexandra Techet, and Professors of Structures and Design under the Civil and Environmental discipline, such as Penny Chisholm and Heidi Nepf for our environmental impact and integration. All of these members could provide great insight and valuable information as we develop our pilot engineering and environment interaction.

MIT MECHE also has a water tunnel facility that could be invaluable to our research as we engineer our pilots.

Outside MIT, we would be interested in a partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for access to much of their expertise but also their Marine Policy Center that tackles political and legal obstacles for new marine technologies. In a similar sense, other great connections or partners would be UN Oceans (including many of the members, e.g. International Maritime Organization, Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific).

We qualify for this prize because we empower the mission of General Motors to be the most inclusive it possibly can be while making STEM education more accessible. Here at Agrisea, we know that by alleviating the immediate pressure of food on communities that struggle for food in the face of droughts, lack of technological development or conflict, it can allow for the opportunity of development within that community. This would open a perfect partnership with GM where Agrisea can provide the sustainable, long-term food systems and GM can create the accessible long-term learning opportunities. Effectively, providing the opportunity and the tools for the development of a community in need. Together, General Motors and Agrisea.

Our potential to help woman are through regional projects. For example, Nigeria's population is rapidly growing but agricultural productivity is heavily affected by salinity, particularly within the Benin and Niger Deltas. The techniques used to mitigate this effect is not accessible to 80% of the national rice cultivation population of Nigeria. The limitation of rice growth prevents a reasonable amount of food or fuel being naturally produced which has lead to 70% of households using solid fuels to cook with and provide heat. Due to cultural practices, the indoor air pollution produced affects young children and women the most.

Agrisea can restore the growth of these salt-affected areas with our salt-tolerant rice while equally producing salt-tolerant Typha. Typha is a crop that has been quickly adopted in Senegal and Mauritania to provide bio-coal, a much cleaner source of fuel for the home. Additionally, the downstream products that can be produced from crops such as Typha is a market swiftly dominated by women in Senegal and Mauritania, an effect we hope to replicate in Nigeria.

The guiding principle of Agrisea is to integrate our technologies with the environment rather than dominate it. Too much of a our technology today advances at the cost of our ecosystem's health! No more, Agrisea wants to develop sustainable food production for the world while benefiting the natural world at the same time.

With a particular focus on the Minderoo Foundation, our farms are designed to provide a surface water habitat for young fish. The farms contain two meshes - one being the slightly larger on the undersurface of the farm, and the other finer on the upper surface of the farm. This upper mesh holds our plants and the lower mesh is designed to increase surface while allowing young fish to swim into the main section of the farm where they can be protected from predators. Also, our farms can be remotely repositioned to shield coral reefs from excess sunlight or to stabilize the seawater temperature to prevent the corals from bleaching. Due to the easy manoeuvrability of our farms the placement of these farms as shields for coral reefs can be very rapid and flexible.

Food is the common language shared between all people, no matter creed, colour, religion, location or spoken language. Food is the way we can introduce the practices of decarbonization even to the farmers focused on subsistence living. When growing rice in salty environments we eliminate huge amounts of methane that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas 28x worse than carbon dioxide for it's warming effects to the planet! We will create a network, accessible to all, that allows farmers to register the Agrisea rice grown on their land per season which calculates the amount of methane otherwise produced. As advised by a leading carbon credit broker, these farmers will be earning carbon credits by preventing the release of methane. Through Agrisea's network these farmers will be able to bolster their income and their yield all while reducing carbon in the atmosphere. In ocean farm situations the amount of carbon sequestered increases as our bacterial fertilizer actively takes in methane from the atmosphere and breaks it down into a fuel for the plant.

We hope this will popularize the active choice of removing carbon from the air by providing it as an economic benefit to the farmer and consumer of the final product.

Agrisea was created to solve world hunger. We are creating a fully sustainable food system by replacing the usage of freshwater and fertile land for crop growth. Instead, we use the most abundant resource on the planet – seawater. We grow rice in the oceans! We live and breathe innovation and sustainability, they are guiding principles that our founders and our team employ in every day life and we turn up to work everyday with that mindset!

For the GSR Prize we want to highlight that we will create a truly sustainable alternative to land agriculture. Our farms use no freshwater, no chemical fertilizers and no land, while producing food more efficiently than any other form of agriculture on the planet. Today we are working on finalising our salt-tolerant rice so that we can deploy it to areas in need, our first large scale operation will be to restore growth of over 300,000 hectares of salt flooded farmland in the Mekong Delta. We have plans for most areas in South East Asia, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria and the Caribbean.
We don't want to stop here either, we have plans to roll out farms and community networks across the globe to promote decarbonization, automated, low-cost farming and to expand the number of crops we work with.