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2024: The Year in Review

We turned 20 years old this year! We look at two decades of impact, and give an overview of twelve high impact projects and initiatives from 2024.

Published November 29, 2024 | Updated December 2, 2024 | Isha Datar,

Did you get a chance to catch out Year in Review community call?

If not – I have good news! Here’s a recording of the call on YouTube.

Not much of a video-watcher? Well we’ve got you covered.

Here are the standalone slides for your perusal, and below is an overview of the main points we covered:

1. Our vision has been consistent
The call began by highlighting a recent piece of speculative fiction from my new favorite publisher, Asimov Press. Farma: Speculative Gastronomy by Xander Balwit is an article about a speculative restaurant which embraces biotech foods and tells their stories through culinary experiences. We compared this recent article with a similar, 10-year-old piece: The Carnery – A Cultured Future with In Vitro Meat written by myself and Robert Bolton. The calling cards of New Harvest are all there – advocating for open science, cellular agriculture as a cooperative movement, and robust public engagement. Take a look at the article, it’s a neat view into how far we have come, but also how the challenges we’re seeing today were speculated 10 years ago.And fun fact – this article was written even before the term “cellular agriculture” existed!

2. Twenty years of field building drive ongoing impact

New Harvest has been uniquely applying the principles of non-profit field building to the cellular agriculture ecosystem. We did an overview of New Harvest’s many interventions and the logic behind them over the past two decades of our work, and summarized the growing impact we have had on the field.
Celebrate 20 Years of NH With Us!
3. Our new strategic plan focuses on facilitative leadership

We’ve crafted a new strategic plan – which you can review and provide comments on here – highlighting the strategies we’re focusing on in the next five years. We believe the most neglected, highest impact work, is facilitating collaboration, to create open research and keep the field on mission. Giving season is upon us and please know that every dollar you give will go directly toward advancing critical, neglected work to move cell ag forward.
4. A review of 12 high impact projects

From about 30:00 onwards in the video, we review 12 major cellular agriculture projects and initiatives that fall into our two new strategies. Many are long term projects that facilitate public-private collaboration. The highlights in the near term? We’ll be hiring two new teammates, sharing seven new publications, and onboarding 17 new researchers right away!

5. Government support is picking up, as we hoped

In 2022, staring down an economic downturn, we made a deliberate decision to downsize and focus hard on securing government support for cellular agriculture projects. We did this the New Harvest way – not through advocacy, but through assembling highly impactful technical projects that bring together public and private players and fill in gaps in foundational research.

We have been able to do this by maintaining a consistent vision, being robust in our commitment to the broader ecosystem and not to specific players, being research-driven, and through 20 years of public service in cellular agriculture!

That’s my overview, but don’t take my word for it! Have a watch of the video or take a look at the slides and let me know if you have any questions or comments about New Harvest’s work.

And stay tuned – this is a big week for us as we rally our community in attempt to reach our goal of raising $310,000 this Giving Tuesday (Dec 3).

If you’d like to make a gift early, you can do so here.

We will also be sharing our latest publications and revealing our newest researchers.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

Talk soon,


Isha Datar
Executive Director
New Harvest | isha@new-harvest.org

P.S. You can make a gift of any size securely here. If you want to give a different way, please reach out to Director of Development Brittany Chambers at brittany@new-harvest.org
About the Authors
Isha Datar