TRANSCRIPT
In the last four or five years in in particular, there’s been a lot of talk about what the future protein is going to look like. And with that, there’s been a lot of focus around some of the downfalls and downsides of animal agriculture, including its environmental impact. That can be in terms of of land use, water use, environmental contamination, the use of antibiotics, a variety of other factors’ contributions to to methane emissions, strictly in the case of livestock production. And sort of this focus into the shift to alternative proteins. Like, plant based proteins, proteins produced via fermentation or via enzymatic production, and then also this emerging category of cultivated meat. What’s important to remember is that animal agriculture is an absolutely enormous global industry, about a trillion dollar industry in and of itself focused on the production of of beef products, poultry products, pork products, aquaculture products, animal agriculture, plays a significant role and has played a significant role in human health and human life and the human food system for thousands of years.
And in recent years, its contribution to to certain negative externalities, including environmental impacts, as well as the ethical treatment of animals has come under significant focus. And that’s led to a lot of investment and a lot of focus into certain alternative categories like alternative proteins, including plant based proteins, fermented, or bio-based proteins and finally cultivated meats, which is an emerging category as well. Now, we at iSelect believe that these four pillars of protein production will continue to be important in the next ten years, the next thirty years, the next hundred years.
And we don’t claim to to be able to predict what’s exactly going to happen. What we do know is that today, and for the foreseeable future, animal agriculture is going to continue to be a significant contributor to the global food system, both from a caloric perspective, but particularly from a protein perspective. And so we look at innovations across these areas, how can we make the food system better? We look at technologies in addition to these alternatives. Looking at how can we make animal agriculture more productive, sustainable and more ethical. And we’ve looked at tools that are able to help implement that and ultimately, bring data to the table that’s not currently available and allow that to both feed into producer level decisions, all the way down to consumer level decisions. That’s largely why we made the decision to invest in Agriwebb. Agriwebb is a tool that expands across the entire livestock supply chain and is principally focused on grass fed and grass finished pastured beef products and beef production.
Agriwebb, in its first instance, allows for producers to use data to drive more profitable and more productive operation. But in doing so, it also creates essentially a digital record of all the information and all the decisions that are made in a livestock production operation.
In doing so, it becomes extremely valuable particularly as the values of consumers shift towards more sustainably grown and more ethically grown animal products. Having a digital verification tool that allows for not only more efficient production of animal protein, which leads to reduced costs, but also verification that certain steps were taken. In order for that beef product to meet the needs of the consumer today, that perhaps didn’t exist fifty years ago, is extremely powerful. And we think there’s a huge amount of opportunity for them to use their growing global network in this growing digital verification set to drive livestock production to meet the needs of the future, where animal protein production will continue to be a part of the food system but do so more sustainably and more ethically.
