Singapore Turns To Cultured Meat To Boost Its Food Security

Cultured meat is the newest menu option for vegetarians. A restaurant in Singapore is selling cultured chicken nuggets made out of chicken cells that were steeped in a nutrient solution. However, one ingredient in that solution is bovine serum which is harvested from butchered cattle, so the process isn’t completely animal-free. Many companies are exploring the idea of developing cultured meat like Wagyu beef, salmon, and even kangaroo.

A greenhouse that is cooled by seawater and the wind is allowing farmers in Somaliland to grow crops like tomatoes and vegetables despite extreme heat. By creating an environment that is higher in humidity and cooler in temperature, plants don’t need to drink as much water — almost 10 times less water because of the cooling system. There are challenges to scaling the response, but these greenhouses offer farmers the potential to increase their revenue in Africa.

BlocPower retrofits buildings with energy-efficient equipment in financially underserved communities by offering loans to building owners for no money down. The company has completed about 1,000 projects by bundling the financing for many projects and finding investors willing to provide capital for the larger sum, which reduces investor risk. The group also created technology to reduce the costs of building inspections and energy usage monitoring. The new equipment increases building values and reduces energy costs so that owners pay less in monthly loan repayments than they would with the old equipment.

A company based in Zurich pulls carbon dioxide from the air and turns it in to stone -- and you can subscribe to their services. The subscription program through Climeworks allows customers to sign up for different price levels in order to purchase the trapping of a certain amount of carbon dioxide per year.

Beyond Meat is a food brand getting acclaim for developing a hamburger replacement that helps save the large amount of energy and resources used to make a typical burger. They have sold over 25 million burgers since their launch, targeting both vegans and meat-eaters, and are backed by notable investors such as Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The National Park Service has resorted to microchipping hundreds of saguaro. Despite extensive legal protections, the iconic cacti are going missing. Rangers can only read the microchip by scanning a suspect cactus, but they hope this move will serve as an additional deterrent to would-be thieves hoping to cash in on the demand for saguaro among building owners.

More than 30-meters below the busy London streets, there is an eco-farm called Growing Underground that's part innovative agri-tech project and part sci-fi inspired netherworld. Created to provide increased food security and combat the environmental degradation caused by mass agriculture, this self-contained, zero-emissions, fully functioning farm provides an exciting opportunity as the world's population grows and food demands increase.

At the Fujitsu factory in Japan, a significant decline in demand for semiconductor computer chips meant the company had large empty factory space sitting unused. A new business approach allowed them to dually address both the need to evolve their business model with a global decline of viable agricultural space needed to grow the world's food. Now, the factory houses indoor vegetable gardens, soil free and less resource-heavy than traditional farmland.

After there was a fungal disease outbreak in the 1990s that affected cacao crops in Brazil, a group of 150 community members got together to collectively manage a farm to grow back cacao trees using agroforestry techniques. Because of their efforts, they sell their cacao to major chocolate brands and have seen their monthly income more than double.

Healthy soil promotes plant growth and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. To help the declining citrus industry in Florida, Locus Agricultural Solutions developed a combination of microbes to promote plant growth. The microbial additive, Rhizolizer, while originally intended to combat citrus greening, also provides benefits in terms of carbon absorption.