How Plant-based Foods Can Power a Healthier Future for Our Planet
The plant-based food sector has the potential to significantly lower the agriculture sector’s climate impact, and Protein Industries Canada enables its innovation.
At Protein Industries Canada, we invest in innovative projects directly with private-sector companies to help them with challenges that they're facing or to capture opportunities in the plant-based food and ingredient space.
Agriculture has an impact on our planet — but it’s not necessarily a negative one.
“Our food systems account for around 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions,” says Bill Greuel, CEO of Protein Industries Canada. Despite this considerable effect, the biological systems that underpin the agriculture sector can also be a solution to the climate crisis. As an industry-led, not-for-profit organization, Protein Industries Canada manages a government innovation fund to accelerate this sustainability advancement and the competitiveness of the Canadian value-added agriculture and plantbased food sector.
Reducing carbon intensity along the entire value chain
As Greuel explains, the use of diversified crop rotations and new farming technologies and innovations make all the difference in reducing the sector’s climate impact.
“Pulse crops are unique in that they require little to no synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which is a major contributor to emissions,” says Greuel. “Diversified crop rotation — growing peas, lentils, fava beans, chickpeas, and soybeans — plus new farming technologies that help sequester carbon such as zero tillage and minimum tillage and innovations such as the use of coatings on fertilizer all help to reduce agriculture’s environmental impact.”
Providing consumers with alternatives to traditional meat, dairy, and eggs is another way to reduce our food system’s impact, says Greuel, adding that this is why investing in plantbased foods is so important.
“At Protein Industries Canada, we invest in innovative projects directly with private-sector companies to help them with challenges that they're facing or to capture opportunities in the plant-based food and ingredient space,” explains Greuel. Protein Industries Canada uses a value chain approach to innovation, working with everyone from genetics companies to digital agriculture companies to ingredient manufacturers.
Lowering agriculture’s climate impact
One of the innovative companies that Protein Industries Canada has partnered with is AGT Food and Ingredients, a value-added processor of pulses and staple foods headquartered in Regina, Sask.
“When we look at how we grow crops and how we optimize and increase yields with the same amount of input, we can see how agriculture’s carbon intensity is going down,” says Murad Al-katib, Founder, President, and CEO of AGT Food and Ingredients, a company that mechanically separates pulses’ components — protein, starch, and fibre — and develops innovative uses for them, turning them into ingredients that the food industry can use to achieve nutritional, functional, and other benefits. “As a sector, we have the ability to solve multiple problems of the world, which include available protein, available food supply, and protein deficiency.”
Alternative protein sources drive climate resiliency and sustainability, and partnerships like the ones fostered by Protein Industries Canada — which prioritize collaboration, diversity of ideas, nimbleness, innovation, and research institutions’ strengths being augmented by strong commercialization — are powering a more sustainable agriculture industry in Canada.
Visit proteinindustriescanada.ca to learn more.
This article is sponsored by Protein Industries Canada.