🔎 What’s going on?
Enko Chem raises USD 45 million to protect crops from pests and diseases. Backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Ventures, the startup uses machine learning to develop novel solutions to crop protection.
🌱🐛 Cool, tell me more!
We’ve already heard about the swarms of locusts (or pests) destroying food crops across the middle east, India and Pakistan. Enko Chem aims to tackle problems exactly such as this. Pesticides and Herbicides company Bayer (owner of Monsanto) just this week settled for $10.9billion over claims that their products cause cancer.
Enko is a technology platform that uses machine learning to develop new formulations that attack just the pest (e.g. weeds, insects, fungus, etc...). The platform uses large data sets of protein targets and pests, along with DNA-encoded libraries of over 120 billion compounds to find safe, sustainable and effective compounds that target only the pests. The goal here is to find compounds that are safe to humans, insects and nearby crops.
The company operating in stealth mode for the past few years aims to benefit smallholder farmers in developing countries first.
❓ Why should I care?
Every year, nearly a third of the global food supply is lost or wasted due to crop damage caused by pests and other weeds. At the same time, the global pesticides market is expected to reach $130billion by 2023 due to their importance in increasing crop yields. However, conventional pesticides (such as Roundup) are harmful to human health, biodiversity, soil health and nearby crops. The demand for safe alternatives is very high!
🚦 Where do we need to be?
We need to increase global food production with the use of pesticides and herbicides that are safe and sustainable for humans, insects and nearby crops.
Experiment with scaling natural techniques such as agroecology and organic farming which are safer for humans and local biodiversity.
👤 What can I do about it?
Switch to organic produce whenever possible to avoid consuming any pesticide residue. And make sure you wash your vegetables and fruits thoroughly before you eat them.