Year: 2021

The United States arrests two foreign nationals months after largest cyberattack on American infrastructure.…

The U.S. Department of Justice announced this week it arrested two men, one a 22-year-old Ukrainian national, the other a 28-year-old Russian national, for their role in the cyberattacks in June that disrupted businesses and government entities in the United States. The DOJ says it also seized more than $6 million in ransom traced back to the hackers.

The arrests come on the heels of two new cyberattacks on agriculture. In September, the cyberhackers hit farm cooperatives in the Midwest, Iowa-based NEW Cooperative and Crystal Valley in Minnesota. Both entities were attacked by what experts believe is the same group that launched the ransomware attack against JBS SA, the nation’s largest meat processor, in June. This comes less than six months after President Biden said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin 16 categories of business, industry, and critical infrastructure in the United States are  “off-limits” to Russian hackers.

Food & Ag in the Crosshairs

At the summit with Putin, President Biden did not reveal what the 16 categories were, but experts believe they are likely the same ones designated as “critical” by the Department of Homeland Security, as shown below.

That’s why alarm bells went off when, after Biden’s warning, the hacker group, known as “BlackMatter”, hit NEW Cooperative for $5.9 million and Crystal Valley for an undisclosed amount? American news outlets report the Russian group posted that they didn’t think NEW Cooperative had enough volume to be a critical company.

New Cooperative disagreed about their volume, telling Modern Farmer the company “provides software to 40 percent of American grain production, as well as feed scheduling for millions of livestock animals.”

The arrests could signal to cyberhackers that future attacks won’t be tolerated.A hit on any part of the food and agricultural sector can not only harm our ability to feed ourselves but to our economy as a whole. The American food and agricultural system accounts for approximately 20% of our nation’s economy. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) reports food and ag consist of over 2 million farms, almost 1 million restaurants, and more than 200,000 “registered food manufacturing, processing, and storage facilities.”

Many people first heard of cyberattacks, ransomware, and anonymous Russian hackers hitting America’s critical infrastructure when the hackers’ work generated major headlines this past June. But this type of technology terrorism has been around for a while. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has been keeping a detailed timeline of cyberattacks. CSIS says crimes of this nature have been happening since 2006. They only track cyber hacks that hit world governments, defense, high-tech companies, or other economic crimes that cause loss of more than 1 million dollars. That certainly includes the recent attacks on the co-ops as well as the attack this June on JBS SA, the world’s largest seller of meat.

Targeting the Big Players

The Wall Street Journal reports JBS SA paid the hackers $11 million dollars in bitcoin to stop the attack and prevent further damage not only to their company, but to their clients as well. “It was very painful to pay the criminals, but we did the right thing for our customers,” JBS CEO Andre Nogueira told the Journal. In a statement the company released to the press, Nogueira added, “we felt this decision had to be made to prevent any potential risk for our customers.”

Security experts estimate that JBS SA was one of 800-1,500 businesses to be hit by cyberattacks this summer. The hackers also targeted the Keystone pipeline and other government infrastructures. CNBC reports in 2020 that these attacks cost companies $350 million in cryptocurrency, a more than 300% jump from the year prior.

Breakdown of a Cyberattack

Here’s how the cyberattacks work: hackers, mostly from Russia, break into a company’s technological infrastructure using sophisticated software and take their data hostage. The hackers then threaten to cause disruptions, release private information, or delete it unless a ransom is paid (hence the name “ransomware”). These attacks are different from physical attacks on infrastructure in that it is the threat of damage, not the damage itself, that gets companies and governments to react.

Few Americans had ever heard of JBS SA, NEW Cooperative, or Crystal Valley before this year or likely understood how high-tech and sophisticated farming has become. In America, there can be a nostalgic view of farming. Farming has come a long way from the horse and plow. Farmers have tractors working off of GPS, sophisticated technology that enables them to manage their crop inputs, and access to markets to assess the futures market at harvest time. That means our ability to keep grocery store shelves filled with affordable food could be more impacted by technological disruptions than extreme weather events.

Bringing in the Experts

Cybersecurity experts, such as Susan Duncan (right), predict this is just the beginning of ransomware attacks on our nation’s critical infrastructure, with food and agriculture being a high-value target for hackers.

Susan Duncan is the Associate Director for the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station and Director of the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture at Virginia Tech. Her work is focused on technology and innovations developed and used in agriculture, food, and nutrition.

D2D interviewed Duncan to understand how the food supply chain is recovering from this summer’s ransomware attacks, how vulnerable agricultural technology is, and what’s being done to limit disruptions from hackers.

D2D: Did the ransomware attack carried out in June against JBS surprise you?

Susan: I wouldn’t say [the ransomware attacks] surprised me in the sense that all of us are vulnerable. Also, it wasn’t the first one that happened. Over the past several years, other agriculture and food companies have had ransomware attacks. They just didn’t receive as much publicity, and the general public was less aware of them.

D2D: Now that the average consumer is more aware of the threat, how should we understand the role technology plays in the food we find in the grocery store?

Susan: You are asking about the connection of technology with our food supply, grocery stores, and the restaurants where we typically find our food. Of course, we all recognize that apples come from orchards, bread from wheat, and the meat cuts in the refrigerated unit at the supermarket came from an animal, but what you might not recognize is that we have the technology behind all of that. Those products likely had some form of technology used on the farm, such as drones, robots, sensors, computers on tractors, computer-controlled irrigation systems, and guided technology for managing animal feeding.

These technologies on the farm level generate data, which can be analyzed and translated into information to alert farmers or help them make decisions about how to manage their farm, protect the environment, and protect their crops and animals from extreme weather events like frost or drought. [It can also tell farmers] when to harvest and sell their crops or animals, so the quality and productivity is the highest. They are using technology to watch for weeds and pests growing in their field crops.

D2D: How vulnerable are these technologies? How secure are the systems?

Susan: Great question. We think incorporating agricultural technologies is safe and needed, but some changes are happening that introduce risks that we haven’t previously thought about or focused on. The connectivity of technology, the increased opportunistic and malicious players that seek access to data and computer-controlled equipment, the lack of awareness for protecting the equipment, computers, and software [all] increase vulnerabilities.

The agriculture and food system is huge, complex, and very diverse. As we saw, major companies, like the meat producer and processor JBS, have vulnerabilities. If you operate a small farm with one computer used to manage your business, store your drone data, analyze your crop data, you may not have sufficient financial resources, personal capacity, and experience to secure your computer. But at the same time, you most likely will not be a target. Cyber thieves are looking for targets with a lot of assets. Farmers should continue to use data and technology – the benefits still far outweigh the risks.

D2D: What questions should the farmer be asking upfront when they purchase technology then?

Susan: If [a farmer] purchased an inexpensive drone, what do you know about the security of the data? If there is backdoor access for control where the data from the drone may be used by a company in other way? How could a cyberattack affect your capacity to manage your business operation? Can you trust the drone data? Is the data corrupted or modified, and how might that influence your decisions for the appropriate management of your crops or animals?

These are all hypothetical questions. We don’t see this happening in the marketplace right now. However, I ask these questions so farmers know to read the fine print on all their technology and make sure they know how their data is being used. Overall, we want farmers to continue to use technology and we believe the benefits outweigh the risk by a significant amount.

Farmers using their technology resources and how to use them is just a smart protection measure. I compare it to wearing a seatbelt while driving. Overall, our risk of a car accident is very low, but we still wear a seatbelt. Well, that’s what we advise farmers to do. Read the fine print, understand how your data is collected, used, and secured. It’s precautionary and wise.

As agriculture is increasingly influenced by computers and becomes more reliant on digital data, we want to address the gaps in awareness and skills that are created. These are the most significant sources of vulnerability.

D2D: There is a need then for more education and awareness for farmers?

Susan: Awareness is important. Knowing the technology vendor and what the small print of the contract says is essential. The data you generate from the tractor, drone, sensor, or other technology may actually be owned by the company, and you don’t own your own farm data. Older systems probably need software upgrades to improve security. You know we all went through that experience with our computers. Haven’t we all experienced the situation when our old computer or smartphone couldn’t use the new software or apps? Old software, with its outdated security and coding systems, may not work on our new computer. It’s best to check on the security and get updated software and security systems on computers.

D2D: What else do farmers and processors need to think about as they deliver their products to market?

Susan: We have to think about how the organization or farm transfers information and knowledge to other entities within the food supply chain. There’s that gap between what you did in your company or what your farm might need versus what the upstream or downstream companies might be introducing.

Are you prepared to accept the risks imposed by the company that you work with if they are not attentive to the security of their technologies and computers? The security of our technology is really dependent on the age of the system. It’s also dependent on the amount of expertise within the company, how much they focus on security, and whether or not they’re willing then to take steps so that they have at least that fundamental baseline security process in place. Because most of the agricultural network comprises small and medium-sized farms and companies, they don’t necessarily have all those resources.

D2D: As farmers become more aware and ask the right questions about their technology, what is being done in the agricultural industry to prevent and protect from cyberattacks?

Susan: Several years ago, a colleague who had worked for years in national security talked with us about cyber biosecurity, which is a developing domain at the intersection of cybersecurity, biosecurity, and cyber-physical systems with applications in the life sciences such as agriculture. That introductory conversation has led to a pretty intensive and expansive engagement for us and at a significant time for our country. This is relevant to securing our production agriculture, biotechnology, and food supply chain and making certain that U.S. consumers and people worldwide do not suffer from a lack of food due to malicious cyber-attacks. Academia, the private sector, and government agencies at the state and federal levels are all working together to ensure our farmers and food can remain safe. It is a continuing effort and not one that has a specific beginning and endpoint. There is also not one solution but a myriad of options from better data management to security to preventing the attacks altogether.

D2D: How safe then is our food supply system?

Susan: Our agricultural food system is extremely safe. It’s not just safer from food borne illnesses, but we are building the technology and public/private infrastructure to address these cyberattacks. Sure, these attacks are scary. But the agricultural community has been through worse, and we’ve always come up with solutions. While bad actors will always be in the world, American farmers are responsive and adaptive, and we are tackling this problem head-on. Farmers and consumers should know there is large community of private and government entities working together to address the vulnerabilities in our food system.

Crusonia Forum Brings Together the Changemakers Driving the Future of Food

“We are here to showcase a new wave of companies that are effectively applying technology to improve, disrupt, and transform agriculture, food and health for the better. We have no idea if a future Amazon is in our midst today, but looking back on it we really had no idea that Amazon would be what it has become.

“In 1996, we just stuck to our belief that the effective, focused and thoughtful application of technology was going to lead to something very big, something very important, and most importantly something better. And we were right.”

With those words, Crusonia executive producer Paul Noglows kicked off Crusonia Forum BKLYN 2021, which brought together the investors, entrepreneurs and thought leaders transforming the global food system.

From the roof of Brooklyn Grange, one of the largest rooftop farming companies in the U.S. with 135,000 square feet of cultivated rooftop space across New York City, Noglows and the iSelect team spent the day discussing food innovations, changing consumer demands, new agtech products and more, with presentations from 15 companies working on solutions in each of these areas and more.

This is all happening because, in the U.S., the cost of treating food-related diseases has begun to exceed the cost of the food itself. We spend about $1.6 trillion a year in the United States on food. We spend between $500 billion and $1 trillion on nutrition-related health care. We’re eating ourselves to death and then trying to medicate ourselves out of it, and it’s not working. Diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, heart disease and more are among the leading causes of death every year with no signs of slowing down.

The good news is that consumers are clearly ready for change: 39% are actively trying to incorporate more plant-based food into their diet and 67% are open to changing their eating habits that adversely impact the environment. But transforming the global food system for the better can only be accomplished through increased innovation, education and investment.

As iSelect CEO Carter Williams explained: “The world’s population is going to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, and that’s happening because people are living longer. We’re also seeing billions more people moving into the global middle class, and when that happens they want to eat differently. They want to be healthier. They don’t want to eat carbohydrates all the time any longer, they want protein. But protein production is not terribly efficient — two and a half pounds of protein needs to go into the pig to give you a pound of pig to eat.”

That’s just the beginning of the inefficiencies of today’s food system. Based on healthcare spending for diet-related diseases, buying a hamburger today for $1.70 could turn into a lifetime cost of $1.90 for the impacts of that burger over time. The disconnect there shows up in the debate around “fixing” healthcare.

That will reduce the need for expensive healthcare down the road and create a $3.6 trillion market that is going to be transformed over the next 20 years, as today’s small startups grow into the leaders of a new food system.

Here are some highlights from the forum, as well as the presenting companies offering solutions in the space: 

The Next Investment Arbitrage: Food Is Health

Carter Williams: “We have two food systems in the United States today. The first was the very practical system established after World War II. The goal in those days was global stability and feeding a growing population by producing vast amounts of food cheaply, largely based on corn and soy. The second system is more focused on fresh, nutritious foods but access is limited because it costs so much to produce those products today.

“The notion of the future food system is one that is high yield, tasty and nutritious — so that people will want to eat it — but it has to be able to scale. So the question is: how do you get the price down? Innovation is a fundamental, deflationary force that will drive down those costs and create a system that is better and cheaper, more protein-dense with fewer carbohydrates.”

How Did We Get Here? Food System Evolution

Nancy Roman, President and CEO, Partnership for a Healthier America: “We are in the midst of a dynamic, societal revolution in food that will no doubt bring changes to American life as big as the cotton gin and the steam engine. But, as with every transformation in human history, along with new possibilities come consequences, some intended and some unintended.

“We are aware of the incredible power of food to build or destroy our health. I know that those of you who are together today are coming at this from different angles. Some of you lead food companies, others are investors, but all of us are thinking about the future. I challenge you, wherever you sit, to not go into this next decade of change without asking what you can do to keep the connection between food and health front and center.”

Food is Health: What’s Your Fix?

Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.L., Professor emeritus of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco: “You probably know that Dannon and Unilever underwent a sugar reduction exercise in the last year and they both touted their success at removing 14% of the added sugar from their portfolio. Well, I’m working with an international food conglomerate called KDD, Kuwaiti Danish Dairy, and they sell sugar in various forms. They sell it in yogurt. They sell it in ice cream. They sell it in juice. They sell it in tomato sauce. As part of my work with them, we have convened a scientific panel and we have determined that we are going to be able to get 78% of the added sugar out of their products by next year. 

“And the reason we can do that is because KDD is not on any stock exchange. It’s privately held. That’s the reason. We’re going to serve as a model for the rest of the food industry. Any food company can do this, but you need data science to analyze every single item in the catalog in order to figure out what’s actually in the food. What do we have to fix? Do we have to get rid of cadmium out of the cocoa? Do we have to get rid of rBST? Do we have to get rid of mercury glyphosate? What sugars need to come out?”

Investing in Food Is Health: The View from Wall Street

Brian Holland, Managing Director & Senior Analyst, Cowen: “I think education is the biggest key. An example that comes to mind as far as a segment that has differentiated itself is plant-based beverages because there’s a need state there. Upwards of 80% of consumers in Asia, for instance, are lactose intolerant. So there’s a need state that exists. There’s a value proposition. And that’s ahead of plant-based meat from a merchandising and quality standpoint. Certainly, the plant-based meat space has made tremendous strides to improve the quality in the past decade, but plant-based beverages have been a little bit ahead of that.

“And then again, it goes back to size and scale. Until we get to a point of mainstreaming we can’t think about the consumer treating these products differently or consuming them differently.

“Right now I know these products are cleaner. I know they’re more sustainable. I’m making a decision based off of that myself. When we start to see that happen more broadly is when consumers will start to look at these products as being different from the incumbents.”

Panel on investment opportunities and challenges in Food is Health. Left to right: Carter Williams, CEO, iSelect; Sanjeev Krishnan, Chief Investment Officer, S2G Ventures; Matt Crisp, CEO & Co-founder, Benson Hill; David Lee, President, AppHarvest.

Learn more about Crusonia Forum and register for future events at CrusoniaForum.com.

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I just got out of the lake this morning after a long swim. It was lovely…blue skies, a bit of early morning breeze, and a loon calling nearby. Afterward, I am always starving, so I dutifully made my post-workout smoothie. As I blended my easy and quick protein powder mixed with milk, hemp hearts, yogurt, avocado, and fruit, I started to think of the new technology on the block – Synthetic Biology.

Moving beyond the lab…

What if my milk and yogurt didn’t come from a cow, an almond, or an oat, but really from fermented yeast? What if the steak I planned to cook for dinner was made from mushroom roots? The same food we know and love, but just made a different way. But make no mistake about the term ‘synthetic’.

The word ‘synthetic’ can make people fear companies are making ‘fake’ food…but that is not what is happening at all. It is really taking food proteins and putting them through the fermentation process. Similar to Kombucha, or the beer we drink on the weekend, fermentation technology has been around for thousands of years. Today, we have just adapted fermentation to the 21st century. Though there are about four different methods of synthetic biology, for the purposes of food, we are mainly talking about the fermentation process.

So how can these innovations be used in food and agriculture to feed the growing population sustainably and nutritionally? Synthetic biology seems to have some of the answers. So much so, that by 2030, it is predicted that most people will have eaten, worn, or used something created by synthetic biology. McKinsey predicts that the annual direct economic potential ranges between $2-4 billion, with around $1 billion of that attributed to material changes in agriculture, aquaculture, and food. Markets and Markets has an even higher prediction; that by 2026, the market will reach $31 billion.

The SynBioBeta report ranks the food and food ingredients industry as the second-highest in the number of investments, behind therapeutics and before life sciences, agriculture, and energy.

Solutions in agriculture range from fully utilizing the soil microbiome to aid in sustainable and increased agricultural production.

And solutions in food are replacing traditional meat, poultry, and seafood with meat created in a lab either by growing cells in a petri dish or fermenting bacteria or yeast.

Some of the companies that create these unique products state they are more sustainable for the environment and can address animal welfare issues.

…and into your fridge

If any of you have eaten the Impossible Burger, then you have experienced food made with synthetic biology. Remember when you took a bite and it was red and juicy, just like a hamburger? This was accomplished by isolating the leghemoglobin protein in the soybean plant that carries oxygen to the root nodules via the protein heme.

In animals, hemoglobin is essential and carries oxygen from the lungs to the cells. That is the part of the hamburger from a cow that ‘bleeds’. Scientists at Impossible Foods make the heme with the leghemoglobin and fermenting it with genetically engineered yeast.

Let’s say you want to make ice cream or cream cheese, but not use milk from a cow. A company called Perfect Day teamed up with agricultural company ADM to create milk proteins without the milk.

Perfect Day orders the necessary milk proteins, whey, and casein from a company with a genetic database that can send you actual genes in the mail. Scientists at Perfect Day combine these proteins in a fermentation tank with a specific synthetically-engineered microflora that ‘supercharges’ the proteins. Then the substance we think of ‘milk’ is created. They even have a non-fat ‘fat’ called Epogee to make the ice cream taste delicious without the calories.

Who would have thought fermenting fungi could create an edible protein? The company Enough also uses fermentation technology to create a meat-like substance, called ABUNDA, by fermenting fungi with sugar feedstocks from grains. This fermented meat substitute has fiber, all nine essential amino acids, vitamin B12, zinc, and iron.

Broadening synthetic applications

Of course, cows produce much more than just meat that we eat. At least 47% of the cow is used for leather, garden fertilizer, jet engine lubricants, tallow…the list is endless. Much of these synthetic materials replace the traditional cow hide, alligator skin, or spider silk. In one case, even jet engine lubricants.

The leather coat you wear, or the belt, even the shoes, all come from an animal – most likely cattle. Modern Meadow, however, is replacing animal-based leather with biofabrication using bio-engineered proteins and fermentation. They grow their protein cells with a yeast culture into collagen which, in turn, goes into making various materials (check out their very interesting process here).

A backpack out of mushrooms? Ecovative Design grows material using the familiar button mushrooms. By fermenting the mycelium – the root structure of the mushroom – they can turn proteins such as cellulose, lignin, collagen, or non-spider silk into strong, soft silk, leather, or even whole-cut meats.

The interesting phrase here is ‘whole-cut meats’. Normally, cell-based meats (those made in a lab) or plant-based meats lack the ‘scaffolding’ to hold it all together. That is why most of the alternative meats are made into a ‘hamburger’. But these fermented mushrooms from Evocative Design can grow into a structure that can help create a steak or a specific cut of meat.

Working in conjunction with Bolt Threads, the British fashion designer Stella McCarthy created a ‘leather’ purse out of the mycelium. Bolt Threads has created manmade spider silk ‘stronger than steel and softer than a cloud.’

Synthetic biology can now supercharge your vegetables, too. For instance, we all know that broccoli is good for us. Today, that saying has never had more meaning. Scientists in Singapore used synthetic biology to restructure a common and benign form of E. coli, Nissle, that is found in our gut. They engineered the bacteria into a probiotic that attaches to the cell of a cancerous tumor in the colon. These bacteria then secreted an enzyme – found in broccoli – into the cell. This concoction became an anti-cancer agent killing up to 75% of tumors in mice. In the future, this could be used as colon cancer prevention or a way to ‘mop up’ cancer cells after surgery, something just plain old broccoli can’t do.

Unfolding and reconstructing DNA

We have come a long way from Gregor Mendel when he began experimenting with crossbreeding pea plants in 1865.

DNA is the blueprint for every single organism. Synthetic biology can rearrange DNA to make whatever material or organism we want. This may sound confusing but let’s start with the basics.

We are familiar with computer coding using a combination of 0s and 1s. It always amazes me what you can do with just two numbers. Well, take four chemical building blocks identified primarily as their letters: A, C, T, G.

These chemical building blocks, called DNA, come together to form genes that instruct our cells to function how we want.

Our genes give us the color of our eyes, our height, and all the genetic codes that make us human. Remember Legos? You could build whatever was in your imagination: an airplane, a motorcycle, a spaceship, the list was endless. Think of the four letters in DNA as four different colored and shaped Lego pieces. Synthetic biology allows us to recreate the DNA in our food and other materials, essentially making our own Lego designs with whichever instructions we choose.

Mail-order genes?

What makes this easy – relatively – are companies that specialize in synthesizing and selling genes. They have what is called a genetic library. We used to go to a library to check out books. Now we look online to find the gene we want and get it delivered to our lab or office.  Twist Biosciences “gives you the flexibility to get the DNA you want, the way you want it. Think bigger, expand your design scope, and accelerate discovery”.

Illumina is sequencing the genes of all living organisms.

If someone is designing and building new products, Illumina provides the infrastructure to figure out the genetic pattern of the A, T, C, & Gs. Like the Legos, you need to make a structure so Illumina will tell you which genes you need.

A company like Ginko Bioworks will restructure the ‘Legos’, or genes, into what you want. But you can’t make the Lego airplane without knowing which pieces you need.

A company doesn’t need to have the technical skills to be a gene sequencer or a protein builder to make milk or meat – they only need certain starter feedstocks, usually sugars that come from grains. Then it goes through the fermentation process to make the desired proteins. For instance, if a company is an expert in fermentation, then they can order the genes they need from a company like Ginkgo Bioworks to make any kind of meat, milk, fabric, or building material.

The world needs protein!

Synthetic biology can synthesize parts of DNA to make plants more resilient to disease, have greater nutrition, and be resistant to climate change.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the most well-funded companies in the synthetic biology space are all focused on feeding people. A high-protein diet is more than a new eating craze — it’s essential to our health. Protein is essential not just after we run, jump, swim, or left weights.  It is the basic building block of life that “keeps the lights on” in our bodies.

Our growing world needs to fuel itself with protein. As COVID-19 continues to rage, it’s more important than ever that humans produce and consume enough protein to boost their immune system, heal from illness and injury, and move and store nutrients throughout the blood.

That is probably why the amount of protein consumed by the world is such a staggering number. The world eats about 467 million metric tons of protein a year. If you put all that meat in rail cars, how long is that train? It would go around the Earth’s equator almost two times.

And by 2035, those 532 million metric tonnes of protein will go around over two times, which is essentially adding a train of railcars going from coast to coast 2.5 times across the United States. The world needs to grow a lot of protein!

Precision fermentation won’t replace all protein, but it will certainly help fill up the rail cars. While we just focused on protein, the market has significantly more potential via the broader technology of synthetic biology.

There is a race between Europe, China, and the U.S. to have the most competitive technology and capture the most of the potential $31 billion in global revenue. That competition will spur excellence, innovation, and an expediated timeline.

This means sooner, rather than later, we may soon have our broccoli spears fighting cancer and grown in a lab down the road.

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I love a good piece of beef. Maybe a steak on special occasions, or just a hamburger off the grill in the backyard. But I’ve also been known to chow down energetically on Mom’s Sunday pork roast, and I still say her fried chicken is the undisputed Food of the Gods. There are probably a few dried-out, half-gnawed chicken nuggets under the driver’s seat in my car, too.

Yup, I’m a carnivore. 

I’m also intelligent enough to see the merit in all the hoopla about meat and its role in health and the environment. I’m not what most folks would call a ‘woke’ kind of guy, but I’m not exactly ‘sleepy,’ either. I understand the importance of making smart choices about the proteins in my daily diet for my own good and that of the planet. I accept that moving forward, plant-based proteins – and plants in general – are likely to play a much larger role in the choices I make about what I eat. I find myself asking a lot more questions about the proteins I consume and where they should come from. I have choices to make.

Right off, I could choose to stop eating meat altogether. Ain’t gonna happen. 

It’s a personal choice. I like meat. It tastes good and gives me a happy, warm feeling and a sense of after-dinner contentment. It provides essential amino acids, some very difficult to find in plants, and satisfies many other nutritional needs.

What’s more, I still struggle with the idea of where all this will end. The beef industry obviously is in the cross-hairs of a lot of people, and it’s already having an effect when profit-minded retailers and restaurants make marketing hay out of a very public decision to no longer sell or promote beef products. Pigs and chickens require water and feed and create environmental issues, too. Maybe not as much as cows, but there are a helluva lot more of them than there are cows on the planet.

Do we simply accept the logic of the argument and say animal protein’s day on the consumer’s plate is over?

To me, all of life has an environmental cost of some sort, animal and human alike. Our day-to-day lives are not perfectly aligned with the environment. For instance, most of us discard our mattresses after a couple of years – and doing so makes up 450 million pounds of waste a year. Since the beginning of Covid, we are all now addicted to hand-sanitizing gel that degrades slowly and accounts for 60% of all drugs in sewage and wastewater.

The question is the value created, measured against the price we pay. I’m happy to listen to all arguments and sides on the issue. I’ll consider your case. But I reserve the right to make my own choice – to find my own balance point in the debate. But my second option is much tougher…

Do I increase the non-animal portion of my caloric consumption? 

I can make vegetable-based and laboratory-produced protein products part of my personal menu. I’ve tried lab-grown meat products, as well as some produced solely from plants, all in the name of intellectual curiosity and discovery. Some of them were okay. I might eat more of them from time to time. But I just couldn’t shake the sense that I was eating something artificial, something more lab-based than nature-based. 

The smart side of my brain says this is most likely the best course for me moving forward. But I still have a few mental hurdles to get over before I go all-in on this option. Remember, I still have nightmares from time to time about the movie Soylent Green, and whoever came up with the damning label “Frankenfood” is a stone-cold marketing genius for the anti-meat, anti-GMO, and anti-science crowds. Enough said about the psychology of the fear of food.

I didn’t blink at all when I read about the report at the elite World Economic Forum in Davos that cited weeds as a potentially significant source of food for a hungry world. I’d already seen promotions from various back-to-the-earth groups (and maybe a few survivalists) making the same point, some offering actually to sell me weed seeds, presumably, so I could get a head start on the trend and avoid having to scrounge on my own along roadsides, in ditches, and almost everywhere in my neighbor’s lawn.

I couldn’t help but think about all those hours I spent as a kid destroying this invaluable food source when my parents made me pull weeds from our backyard garden for hours on end, either to build my character or punish some filial sin or probably both. 

Maybe I think even bigger and go all European in my approach.

The European Union’s food regulatory agency recently issued approval to the use of mealworms in animal feed – and as a human food. Other parts of the world embraced insects as food long ago. Nothing says “oh, yum!” to me more than a heaping plate of grubs, maybe with a side of worms and a nice side salad of dandelions and other home-grown weeds.

In our childhood – age 14, actually – my younger brother once ate three worms on a dare, and we all know how that turned out. He still can’t do eights and nines in the multiplication tables. 

Going European also would make it easier to leap to the next level of protein management.

Why not just man up and go vegetarian or vegan?

Put aside a Pavlovian liking for meat that goes back to the Eisenhower Administration. What kind of plant-centric diet should I follow?

Start with the basics. Vegetarians consume some animal-derived food products, such as milk and eggs, and vegans don’t. But I’m not exactly au courant on the ins and outs of vegan eating, so let me do a quick search in cyberspace and see if that offers any helpful guidance.

Right out of the Google gate, there’s what’s called the Whole Food Vegan Diet. This diet allows me to eat fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. The Raw Vegan Diet also seems to involve no animal products – I suppose meaning fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds, and so on, only not cooked. Except for some foods that are allowed to be cooked to 104 degrees, for some reason. One set of Raw Vegan devotees apparently follow the diet up till 4 p.m. every day. After that, I suppose, anything goes.

A so-called Gluten-Free Vegan Diet just adds gluten to the list of what not to eat. Next, my search engine gives me the Fruitarian Vegan Diet, in which I’m supposed to avoid plants and eat only fruits, nuts, and seeds. Except some Fruitarians also prohibit the consumption of seeds since they contain future plants. 

The Paleo Vegan Diet restricts me to the pure and unprocessed foods consumed by my Paleolithic ancestors. That would let me eat lots and lots of fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, seeds, and nuts, but no grains or legumes, since they weren’t around as food options for the Stone Age connoisseur. 

And a Freegan Diet permits consumption of processed vegan foods, including mock meats and vegan ice cream, whatever the hell that is.  

Try as I might, I suspect my efforts at plant-centric eating would leave me underfed, undernourished, and underwhelmed. 

Maybe I just avoid the whole subject with others…

…my friends, relatives, coworkers, church members, LinkedIn communities, Instagram and Twitter followers, neighbors, extended warranty salespeople, therapists, and anyone else I ever meet. If trapped into some comment on the subject, lapse into the double-talk and non-sequiturs I sometimes use to convey senility, or if absolutely necessary say all the politically correct things needed to get me out of the immediate pickle.  

I then retreat to my basement or my garage or my two-man tent in the backyard or my sofa-cushion fort in the rec room, where I surreptitiously chow down like the hungry dog I am on year-old frozen meatloaf, Slim Jims, Vienna sausages, Spam, BBQ chicken wings, and any other meat product I can hoard.

I join the growing legions of the Meat Underground, secure in my knowledge of the secret handshakes and high fives its members use to connect with like-minded but guilt-ridden meat junkies. There’s no 12-step program for us, so we just have to do the best we can, one day at a time.  

Maybe I just stop eating altogether.

My health plan is pretty good, so maybe I could simply opt for regular intravenous feedings of essential nutrients. That sounds like a pretty efficient, Spockian way to deal with the matter. 

I can’t face the final years of my life as a social pariah because I made the wrong choice about what kind of protein I consume. And it sure seems right now that any choice I make – short of not eating at all – is going to be morally offensive, irresponsible, perhaps sinful, environmentally callous, unscientific, irrational, politically charged, or just flat-out wrong to all the experts so eager to guide me to the truth on questions of food, nutrition, the environment, social responsibility, humanism, science, and morality.  

I just don’t know what to do. Other than, of course, grilling a hamburger while I ponder the matter further. And maybe a nice cold beer would help, too.

Let me get back to you on this one. 

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The best part of the conversation with my friend was her honesty. “Lucy when I think of how we get our meat, I think of Yellowstone, the TV series. It’s Kevin Costner and a bunch of hot cowboys rounding up cattle under a gorgeous setting, herding the cows into a warehouse where they come out the other side as my Bubba burgers. So I’m pretty unaware of how technology plays into this”.

After we got done laughing, I realized that was a fair point. After all, the food supply chain is not visible to most and the technology used in ag is not something people think about on a regular basis.

I assured my friend the cyberattack did not make our food unsafe and that there wouldn’t be any shortages. I told her I would use this week’s blog post to explain the entire cattle-to-meat process, the role technology plays, and what the ransomware attacks did. And, I even promised to sneak in a photo of those hot cowboys from Yellowstone.

What Happened to JBS?

Let’s start with the basics. Brazilian-based JBS, the largest meat supplier in the world experienced a ransomware attack. The FBI believes that REvil, one of the most advanced Russian cybercriminals in the world, hacked into JBS computer systems and either encrypted its files or shut its system down in all U.S. beef plants, as well as its meatpacking facilities around the world.

In return, the hackers wanted money; JBS ended up paying them $11 million in ransom. The payment was in bitcoin.

In the past, criminals kidnapped people in exchange for money. Today, it seems that kidnapping computer systems in return for U.S. dollars or cryptocurrency is a more lucrative business.

What Does Technology have to do with Cattle?

Think of processing cattle like an auto assembly line, but in reverse. When a car is made, 30,000 parts must be assembled before it gets shipped to the auto dealership. Cattle, on the other hand, get taken apart into over 1,000 SKUs. We eat about 63% of the animal and the rest goes into just about every other industry imaginable. Most people don’t think of cattle when imagining the ingredients used in medicine, pharmaceuticals, soaps, fine bone china, leather, and even asphalt.

It’s Very Complicated

In the United States alone, more than 100,000 cattle are processed six days a week. JBS produces between 20%-25% of global volume — further evidence of South America’s rapid growth in livestock production. The technology involved to create the assembly line of 1,000 SKUs is intricate and complicated.

First, the cattle need to be trucked from the grasslands or the feedlot to the processing plant. An inventory management system is needed to purchase the cattle. As they are waiting outside, they are individually tagged and identified. Each animal has its own identification code that follows the various body parts at every stage. For instance, a particular code is associated with the ground beef you buy at Walmart and the steak at Kroger’s. And the tongue that is sent to Japan. And the liver that winds up in Egypt.

After the hide is stripped off the animal, the carcass goes into a washing station. Think of a car wash. It gets cleaned and the goal is to remove and kill all pathogens. Computer settings control the amount of water, spray, and heat. After the wash, USDA employees use computer-driven scanners at each processing plant which inspect for pathogens, grades each carcass and make sure the facility meets strict HACCP requirements.

Technology is critical to managing the 2,000-plus employees in the facility. Each employee in these meat-processing plants stands next to a large, precise, and sophisticated assembly line. The line keeps moving so each worker has to keep pace by cutting their specific parts such as the tenderloin, ribs, and strip loin, etc. The technology tells the plant manager how many workers are present, how productive they are, and if there is any wasted meat.

Quiet on the Set

As in Yellowstone, the typical meat plant is much like a movie studio, with hundreds of people all doing different jobs to create the final product, a polished cinematic gem. Everybody has a part to play and a carefully crafted script to follow, and that script is run by technology.

If the lights are wrong or the sound isn’t perfect, or the sets or costumes aren’t completed or the actor flubs a line, the whole process grinds to a halt. Cattle processing demands the same coordinated ballet.

Plant managers depend on computers for that coordination and control – to pull dozens if not hundreds of actions altogether, effectively, and efficiently.

After this incredible coordination of processing the animal –where does all the beef and the over 1,000 different SKUs go? Managing and sending all those parts is definitely not executed with an Excel spreadsheet and a fax machine. Complex automated inventory management systems send each item boxed and shipped around the country and throughout the world. In the average meat facility, about 5,000 animals go through the system every day.

And each animal produces about eight boxes of beef which must be invoiced and sent to the right locations. While there are giant coolers that hold about 100,000 boxes of beef, the product can’t sit there for more than 24 hours. Every day, about 60 trucks come to the facility to pick up the 40,000 boxes that must be trucked out to their customers.

Every step from the ranch and/or feedlot through the processing plant to the grocery store or restaurant is handled with a complex data management system. When that breaks down as it did in the case of the JBS hacking, it halts the entire beef production – from steaks to animal feed. This time the hackers picked an exceptionally good time to infiltrate JBS’s system.

For the next three months, beginning on Memorial Day, meat consumption is at an all-time high, and the number of cattle that get processed each week increases by about 10%-15% to meet the needs of worldwide grilling, barbecues, and overall summer fun. It is very encouraging to see how quickly JBS was able to respond and get its systems up and running.

Keep Calm and Carry On

According to NPR, REvil has indicated that the agricultural industry will be a target. So far, Mondelez, Molson Coors, Campari, Arizona Beverages, MGP Ingredients, Wendy’s, Huddle House, Caribou Coffee, Dunkin’, and Sonic have all had cybersecurity incidents within the past few years.

It looks like this is just something corporate America has to live with. Given that these were not as well-publicized as the JBS attack, we can assume that this will be an ongoing issue where the company will handle it and keep its business operational. It is a matter of who has the better technology.

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Grocery delivery has boomed since COVID hit. Gone are the days of waving at the milkman from the kitchen window as he dropped your glass milk containers off for the week. Recent innovations will soon allow online supermarkets to bring food to your door in a sophisticated, temperature-controlled, bacteria-killing environment. How will they maintain perfectly chilled meat, produce, dairy, and other perishables?

The New “Big Box”

Walmart offers an option: together with HomeValet, they are testing temperature-controlled smart boxes that can be stationed outside your home so your groceries are delivered contact-free at any time of day, even without having to be home. According to HomeValet, the UV-C LED disinfection method creates “an inhospitable environment to microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, molds, and other pathogens.”

To the right: the smart box technology uses a UV-C light inside the box, where items are sanitized before removal to ensure cleanliness before you bring them inside.

Like HomeValet, many grocery retailers are experimenting with different ways to meet growing consumer demands, like providing online ordering, mobile apps, and QR (Quick Response) codes that let consumers pick up goods curbside, drive-through, via same or next-day home delivery, or even in secure lockers at convenient locations. While these options are exciting to see and are a welcomed change in efficiency and safety, they have significant implications for the greater supply chain.

Supply Chain Disruption Demands Flexibility

Here’s some context: shifts brought on by COVID-19 have put tremendous pressure on (and new opportunities for) our food supply chains. According to a customer research study, 54% of consumers bought fresh food online this past year, and 70% of shoppers intend to continue online grocery shopping for the foreseeable future.

What’s more, over 100,000 restaurants and bars in the US have closed permanently due to COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association. Fewer restaurants, lower bar-food demand, rising demand at the grocery store, and new delivery options create a market where grocery supply chains must be more flexible than ever.

Flexibility needs to come in many shapes and sizes: personal shoppers must know how to pick out the perfect tomato, shipping and packing technologies should be designed to handle last-minute shifts in distribution networks, and inventory planners need to keep track of what will be stocked in-store and what can ship directly to consumers. It is surmised that this need for elasticity will remain a critical component of a successful supply chain, even long after Covid has gone away.

E-grocery businesses can only be effective if automation at the warehouse and distribution centers have the capability to shift from a business-to-business channel to a direct-to-consumer model. With 80% of consumers having grocery-shopped online since the start of Covid, being able to shift from one channel to another is critical. Significant automation is needed for delivery as well. With over 40% of essential items now being ordered online (think toilet paper), the delivery portion of supply chains has to accommodate larger volumes, as well as extra hours for cleaning and sanitizing.

A Look at Several Solutions

Now picture yourself picking up your favorite soup, and it’s the last one on the shelf. Behind you comes a little self-driving robot, scanning labels on shelves, checking stock levels, and alerting employees of low inventory. That is exactly what Simbe Robotics has developed. Schnucks Markets in the Midwest is one of the first to use the technology.

Meantime, Broad Branch Market — in partnership with Starship Technologies — has integrated their automation system with six-wheeled self-driving robots that have sensors aiding delivery to customers.

Almost 2,000 Walmart stores use Brain Corp’s robots to clean and sanitize, opening up employee hours for the workforce to focus on stocking and shipping online grocery orders.

Knock, knock! Who’s there? Robots with your food order!

Some major grocery chains are partnering with inventory management kings to help with grocery shipping and fulfillment. Amazon assists with same-day delivery at Whole Foods and Kroger’s, which are both rapidly expanding their networks to meet rising grocery delivery demands.

Other fulfillment solutions include the expansion of robotic handling. Albertsons Co., for example, has created a series of “micro fulfillment centers” providing a scalable model for rapidly filling thousands of grocery orders daily. These are large warehouses with integrated picking, packing, and shipping robots that provide more efficient work than human workers can offer in-store. The centers store popular items that have historically bottlenecked at a shipping level due to shipping delays. Having this type of inventory in an automated store warehouse has helped to avoid that bottleneck and helped turn the product around to consumers faster.

Thank goodness I can find my two-ply and burger meat in-store anytime now!

Narrowing the Transit Window

For the first time, in 2019, a self-driving truck delivered goods from Cupertino, CA to Quakertown, PA, almost 3,000 miles away. Plus.ai, based in California, has developed this truck to help out when there’s a shortage of drivers and provide a touchless option.

Much like the fulfillment challenges, narrowing the time to get products from the processor to the warehouse to the distribution center to the grocery to the consumer has created logistics strains. With next-day air shipping raising expectations for greater speed and “panic buying” necessitating a need for quick processor-to-retailer turnaround to keep shelves stocked, the previously ‘easy’ delivery planning is a thing of the past. Having speed-to-shelf also depends greatly on having inventory in the right locations, and having those locations align with available trucking capacity.

The ground-based transportation industry, which moves goods from processor to retailer to consumer, is under unique stress. They are dealing with staffing challenges due to nationwide emergency drivers needed elsewhere, drivers leaving the industry for higher-paying jobs with better benefits, and drivers making important decisions about pausing their employment to preserve their health amid Covid concerns. Trucking connects all links in the food chain.

Agility with Inventory

The key to addressing each link in the chain is to have end-to-end inventory visibility. This allows the entire supply chain to react quickly to demand without chain-wide disruption. A major component to this is labor flows and resource allocation—or identifying how to be most efficient. This will allow for our food orders to reach us faster and increase our likelihood of reordering. One way grocers are doing this is by cutting their product offerings. Because consumer brand loyalty has all but gone out the window with COVID — with over 75% of consumers having changed brands during the pandemic due to convenience, or availability — consumers are now just taking what they can get as grocers are implementing a more streamlined product offering.

According to a report cited by Food Dive, “the average number of product offerings in grocery stores declined 7.3% during the four weeks ended June 13 … The drop came across a range of product categories, with frozen down 8.5%, deli slipping 7.7%, meat posting a decline of 7.1%, and dairy falling 6.6%.” For example, some grocery stores now offer only four choices of toilet paper, where prior to COVID they carried about 40 varieties.

By trimming away less profitable products that may be more complicated to produce and/or ship, factories and distribution networks can cut down on labor and time. Room on grocery store shelves is then opened up to products and inventory that is more reliable and can quickly meet consumer demand. A good example of this comes from PepsiCo, which decided to stop producing one-fifth of its products during COVID for efficiency reasons and will maintain a 5% reduction in its Frito-Lay snack division.

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I have been working in the agriculture industry for a long time. Over 30 years to be exact. But it wasn’t until I entered the highly-perishable fresh produce sector a decade ago that I gathered a true appreciation for how complicated – and how powerful – a transparent supply chain can be.

For many deep-rooted and emotional reasons, consumers have a close relationship with their fresh produce, scanning the produce aisle high and low for just the right piece of fruit to take home. And if at a farmer’s market, they’ll often quiz the farmer on how the product was grown, what crop protection products were used, and when was it picked. Arguably, the consumer’s relationship with fruits and vegetables is the most complicated one in the supermarket.

Different Views on Produce

When I speak to consumers about transparency, they reflect with varied responses. Some will say they want to get to know the specific grower that produced the beans or apples. What type of land was the crop raised on? What chemicals were sprayed, if any? What similar products can I purchase from that particular farmer?

When I speak with growers, transparency means building deeper loyalty with retailers and the consumers they serve (with hopes the loyalty is returned). But equally important, it’s a way to keep track of the product in case of food safety inquiries and also ensuring the quality of food arriving at its final destination — a nudge for growers to improve transparency.

A Push for Transparency: Savings & Security

Like with most technologies, there must be a benefit for increased transparency to become more ubiquitous. The most tangible benefit is financial, of course. That could come in the form of cost savings by eliminating a portion of the supply chain, or through increased margin at the checkout stand demanded by a premium label.

At the same time, it could also be an opportunity to protect market share. We’ve all seen the many recalls for romaine lettuce. We’re told of a few brands and bar codes to be aware of, but how do they know? The ability to trace-back a product to a particular warehouse or field is very important for a retailer and the consumer.

In the case of a food safety incident, quick trace-back can mean the difference between a small recall involving one or two growers, or a larger investigation that involves tens of millions of dollars of impacted product. And, if consumers fall ill from the incident, a bruised reputation for the retailer or brand, regardless of the outcome.

A Tool for Telling a Story

According to a 2020 study by the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and Label Insight, shoppers have higher expectations for transparency when shopping online compared to in-store. Think back to the early days of COVID-19. According to FMI, online grocery purchases soared to 27% of all grocery spending for the March/April period of this year, compared to 14% in February.

This increase in online sales will undoubtedly drive consumers’ interest in a more transparent system. Why? In the store, you can look and feel the product you are about to purchase. Online, you need something more to tell the complete story of a product – how it was grown, when it was picked, size, and other quality attributes. That’s where transparency fills the gaps.

When you go to a grocery store, what do you want to know about your fruits and veggies? Why would you pick a particular brand of berries over another? Or what is it that you like about a particular store’s produce section? We often look for certain benefits when we purchase a product. It starts with the basics of getting a good product at a fair price. But beyond that, transparency helps the consumer make a purchase.

A Demand from Millennials

The effect of transparency on purchase decisions is even starker among the Millennial generation. According to a Snacking Trends Report, this demographic is increasingly making purchasing decisions based on “the tenets of self, society, and planet”, which feeds into sustainability.

Millennials have a real connection to the betterment of the planet, and brands need to be careful not to miss this. They must embrace the new level of transparency that Millennials have elevated. Just “talking the talk” will no longer cut it.

Farmers Demanding Price Visibility & Insights

Farmer acceptance of transparency technology is growing for multiple reasons. In the case of fresh produce, transparency allows the grower to look for efficiencies in the supply chain. Not only with their operation, but in the part of the chain above and below them.

Going the other direction in the supply chain, a grower may be able to directly access consumer insights on their products and brand. In the past, that information may have been maintained by retailers or distributors that, in turn, passed it along to the grower. The net result of this shift is quicker and better-informed decisions about what to grow.

And more importantly, they can look for particular attributes to provide the highest return from the marketplace. Similar to the consumer, it often comes down to economics: can I increase my revenue or lower my costs through the use of new technology that pulls up the shades somewhere else in the supply chain?

Promising Technologies in the Works

New technology has a way of telling the story of ‘what’s possible’. Here are two promising examples:

Founded in 2013, a Californian company called safetraces developed DNA “barcodes” that can be added to fruits and vegetables via a liquid spray or wax. What’s so special about that? The company takes a small piece of synthetic DNA from organisms not typically found in the produce section – like seaweed – which they mix with trace amounts of sugar and create a sprayable solution. According to the company, the spray is odorless, tasteless, and poses no food safety risk.

If a problem with the product arises, the DNA on the surface can be swabbed and identified within minutes. Placing the DNA barcode directly on fresh produce significantly reduces the potential for traceback information to be lost. Produce boxes, which traditionally carry the tracking information, are discarded long before anyone catches on to a problem.

In a different twist on innovative traceability technology, software company HarvestMark partnered with iFood Decision Sciences to create a solution that allows consumers to not only view each step along the supply chain, but to provide feedback and reward those brands they feel are doing the best job of transparency.

The product information is collected and shared with the consumer on an item-level basis. The consumer has instant feedback linked to the product’s age, origin, and location. This allows the grower to see how a specific product performs on the grocery store shelf and then make short and long-term production decisions.

In addition to the quality and analytical measurements provided to the grower, like temperature control, inventory monitoring, and supplier notifications, this traceability system also provides a mechanism for product recall in case there is a food safety incident.

The real power of the HarvestMark technology comes through the integration of both the consumer and analytical supply-chain feedback. A highly perishable raspberry variety, for example, might have great flavor and visual appeal according to consumer feedback. Through the analytics of the traceability software across the supply chain, the grower can maximize the shelf-life of the raspberries and reduce perishability at the store level. The result is increased income for both the grower and the retailer…and a happy customer who returns for repeat business.

The promise of this technology will be optimized even further using blockchain applications, which enables the industry to share data up and down the supply chain while maintaining the integrity of the data at each source.