A Dispatch from the Field

New Harvest is going to be turning 20 years old this year (!!!!!!!!!!) and we’re preparing a new strategic plan so gathering insights and field intelligence is critical right now.

I’ve been on the road a lot this year*. We’re fundraising for some neat projects (email me if you want to learn more, one is a highly impactful 1:1 funding match opportunity!) and also checking in with the ecosystem on where we are as a field.

New Harvest is going to be turning 20 years old this year (!!!!!!!!!!) and we’re preparing a new strategic plan so gathering insights and field intelligence is critical right now.

Across these journeys – to Boston, Montreal, NYC, San Francisco, Calgary and more – four things stood out to me:

1. The first was a birthday party.

A cake commemorating an historic Facebook thread.

On March 27, 2015, the New Harvest community took to Facebook and named this field. The prompt? Asking what a center for excellence at a university focused on animal-free animal products might be called. And there, “cellular agriculture”, the term, was born!

Nine years later, we’re celebrating this birthday with a party at the first such center for excellence – the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA).

We took a walk down memory lane with a fun panel discussion where we reflected on where we’ve come from in the field, where we’re going and how so much has changed.

The biggest highlight from this event was learning that TUCCA is now supporting one hundred cell ag researchers. 100! New Harvest supported 6 researchers** there from 2015 onwards, and we’ve seen that figure multiplied 16x in less than ten years.

2. The second was visiting UCDavis for the first time. It was awesome to see a campus with so much food science and agriculture, wholly complementary to what I saw at Tufts. And there I learned that UCDavis is now supporting over 50 cell ag researchers! New Harvest supported 2 researchers*** there in 2019, and we’re already 25x in less than 5 years.

Dr. David Block and Kara Leong, who are driving cell ag growth at UCDavis, in “the lab that [New Harvest Research Fellow] Ted built” where their cell ag program started – David’s words! Notice the New Harvest sticker 🙂

These are the stories of just two universities.

And after hearing the ambitious and exciting plans these two institutions have going forward, that impact will only continue to multiply. For instance, Tufts just announced that they are seeking to hire five full-time cellular agriculture professors!

The immense growth we’ve seen at both Tufts at UCDavis is testament to the vision of the donors who support us, the researchers we supported, and the university leadership that followed their lead.

Support the foundations of cell ag. Donate now!

3. The third story is from Calgary, where I shared the stage with Canada’s primary alternative proteins funding agency, Protein Industries Canada, a researcher 3D printing food for the US army, and the CEO of the Global Institute for Food Security. This was a fun and novel chance to talk about the realities of ushering in a new food system in the contexts of supply chain, economic development, and scale.

4. The fourth standout memory is far less heartwarming than the first three.

At the Tufts birthday party, a friend showed me this headline on his phone and my heart just sank.

In the nine years since we’ve named the field, headlines like this have only become more common. Cell ag is growing but not fast enough. All around us we’re seeing food security threatened by disease and climate change. And yet the urgency is not high enough for us to break down silos in the private sector, focus on collaboration, and unite around cellular agriculture’s mission to create a better world.

Trends emerged from my travels which align completely with what my team has been seeing in their regions – concern about decreased availability of venture capital, excitement in the new government and philanthropic investments in the field, and a sobering sense that we must do things differently if we are to unlock a new food system through cellular agriculture.

We need to extend into and better understand the climate and agriculture communities.
We need to think about infrastructure, financing, and aligning with government priorities.
We need more systems thinking and less private-sector solutionism.
We need less flashiness and more heads down work.

My hope is high because the hype is low. No distractions!

We’re excited to incorporate all of this into our plans for the next few years of New Harvest’s work. I am confident that the impact we can drive in the next 5-10 years will be orders of magnitude beyond what we did in the past 5-10 years.

Thanks again to all of our supporters who believe in our approach and trust in our process. The field is where it is thanks to you, too!!

Don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any reflections or thoughts we should hear about as we work on our strategic plan. You’re part of this ecosystem.

Adios for now,

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

*Thanks to a generous donation from anonymous donor GT to cover New Harvest’s travel expenses! A very high impact contribution.

**Natalie Rubio, Andrew Stout, John Yuen, Sophie Letcher, Kaili Chen, and Julian Cohen were the researchers funded by New Harvest at Tufts

*** Zachary Cosenza and Ted O’Neill were the researchers funded by New Harvest at UCDavis