Farmless

SOLAR POWER: THE ULTIMATE PROSPERITY ELIXER 📈 Paired with batteries, solar power is an unstoppable force. Within the decade, it will dwarf every other form of electricity generation. Like Moore’s Law, solar learning curves have predictably driven cost declines for over fifty years. We’re just a few doublings away from solar powering the entire civilizational stack. Soon, solar will be so cheap it will unlock industries once unimaginable: abundant desalination, off-grid data centers, large-scale mineral recycling, electric steel plants … and hydrocarbons pulled straight from the air. Despite insultingly low conversion inefficiencies, solar fuels made from CO2 and water will outcompete oil. These solar fuels will act as the drop-in replacements for shipping, long distance flying, chemicals and many other sectors. Drilling into the Earth’s crust will seem increasingly irrational – just like we once burned whale oil for light. This is good news for humanity because it will act like a prosperity elixir. Every industry that can take advantage of solar power will see its cost DECLINE over time. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗼𝗱? Three billion years ago nature got stuck somehow with molecular machinery that never quite evolved out of its local maximum for capturing energy. And because of the low photosynthetic efficiencies farming has consumed half of all arable land just to function. But here’s the good news. Food production doesn’t need to be bound by photosynthesis. Agriculture can tap directly into this deflationary solar learning curve with solar alcohols – made from CO₂ and water. Using natural fermentation we can turn solar alcohols efficiently into a wide range of wholesome, amino acid complete proteins. Simple solar alcohols in, tasty proteins out. This isn’t theoretical. We’ve built it. At Farmless, we’ve developed a vertically integrated, natural fermentation platform that produces protein at radically higher efficiencies than plants or animals. It’s a clean process, in the form of a brewery, bringing a new harvest to our world. The next step is to scale it. These types of proteins will get cheaper over time, while current agricultural systems will only get more constrained. 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘅𝗶𝗿. We’re not alone. There’s a wave of companies turning solar energy into proteins, fuels and materials, laying the foundation for a world of abundance. Terraform Industries (hydrocarbons), Prometheus (hydrocarbons), Solar Foods (proteins), ZEF B.V. - Zero Emission Fuels (hydrocarbons), Air Protein (proteins), Aerleum (hydrocarbons), Centeon (Green ammonia), Rivan Industries (hydrocarbons), Sunfire, NitroVolt (Green ammonia), Twelve (Solar alcohols)

FOOD IS CULTURE 🥘 I picked up Well Fed by James Collier expecting a deep dive into nutrition and sustainability. And I got exactly that! Collier, as co-founder of Huel, has built a company around science-backed food. But what surprised me most when reading the book wasn’t a debate on macros or micronutrients. It was a reminder of something more fundamental: food is culture. The word itself traces back to agriculture: “the tilling of land,” “the act of cultivating.” Food and culture have always been inseparable, shaping civilisations, traditions, and even our biology (like how some populations literally adapted lactose-tolerance). Yet somehow we ended up in a world full of desk lunches and eating in front of screens. We pretend this is “efficient.” But the research says otherwise: 🔹 People who eat together have lower stress and stronger social bonds. 🔹 Children who share meals with family have lower rates of depression and anxiety. 🔹 Eating mindfully releases oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, neurochemicals that strengthen human bonds. At Farmless, we feel strongly about this. We don’t just eat: we cook, smell, taste, and share meals together. It’s a conscious decision made from day one. In a fast-moving startup, where pressure is high and priorities shift daily, shared meals keep us grounded. They create space for open conversations, unexpected ideas and bad jokes. You don’t build culture in meeting rooms. You build it at the lunch table. Want an easy way to make your team feel connected? Want better performance? Break bread together. Well fed: a great read! P.S. I love that James clearly did his homework: Well Fed takes cues from some of my favourite books (The Wizard and the Prophet, Sapiens, Animal Liberation).

My fellow process technologists out there will likely relate to that cool feeling: bringing a process from lab scale to pilot! Finally leaving that bucket centrifuge behind, no more tie-wraps but metal fittings, proper mass flows (and, more often than not, mess as well 😅), and the happy faces of your application colleagues when you finally deliver kilos instead of grams. Come and join my colleague Mark Philip and the rest of the Farmless team. We're going through an exciting phase and, really, it doesn't get more "hands-on" than this! https://lnkd.in/eUB6KuGE

MASTERS OF EFFICIENCY 🇳🇱 The agricultural productivity of The Netherlands is INSANE. - Second-largest agricultural exporter globally (after the US, a country 237x larger)  - Largest exporter of onions, potatoes and seeds. Second in tomatoes.  - Yields are off the charts. with 4X more tomatoes per hectare than the runner up. - Wageningen University & Research is hands down the best place for food innovation. - Leader in seed tech, Europe’s largest brewery (cheers The HEINEKEN Company) and with the Port of Rotterdam we’re connected to the entire world. Really, it’s hard to think of a better place to build. In fact, the Netherlands should go ALL OUT to build the next wave of agricultural powerhouses that increase efficiency, generate wealth and feed the world in the coming decades. I’m saying this because we’re nowhere near the physical limits of agriculture. With JUST our type of fermentation we can easily 1000X protein production per square kilometer. That is decades of double digit export growth. We could become the top protein exporter of the world. And that’s just us. But there’s so much room for improvement in regenerative agriculture (Odd.Bot - "Robotics for a Sustainable Future", Trabotyx), improving greenhouses (Source.ag, Plantlab) creating new categories (UPFRONT, revyve, Northern Wonder - Coffee Free Coffee, The Protein Brewery, FUL Foods , Willicroft), growing seaweed off shore (Kelp Blue, The Seaweed Company), fermenting fats (NoPalm Ingredients), dairy (De Nieuwe Melkboer, Those Vegan Cowboys , Time-travelling Milkman), improving meat (Meatable, Mosa Meat, Upstream Foods, ENOUGH) We have talent and infrastructure. To all above and more: It’s time to build.

There’s a 50% chance you wouldn’t exist without the Haber-Bosch process.

🚨 Opportunity: Video Production internship 🚨 🎥 We're looking for an independent, allround video maker with a burning ambition to get better at their craft. ✨ You will be embedded in our team for six months. You will work and laugh and cry with us. You will have the freedom to explore your talent in shooting video and storytelling and work directly with our CEO and Head of Comms. So why spend time at Farmless? 🏋️ At Farmless we're working on fermented proteins with unparalleled performance. 🌅 Our mission is to create an era of food abundance for humanity. 👌 We're a small, optimistic, ambitious and technical team with experience at The Vegetarian Butcher, DSM & Noma. 🎥 Our fermentation process is clean and beautiful and is ready for its close up. 💸 We raised € 6 million with top tier investors such as World Fund, Vorwerk Ventures, Revent and Nucleus Capital. 🇳🇱 We're building our first brewery in the Netherlands - one of the most productive regions in the world, with a mindset of relentless agricultural innovation. Application link in the comments 👇

What will it take to sustainably feed 10 billion people? 👨🏻🌾 That's one of the questions I explored with Adnan Oner, the founder of fermentation startup Farmless, for this article for Maddyness. 🌾 As two fellow Yuval Noah Harari fans, we covered a lot of ground: from the evolution of food to how the Agricultural Revolution shaped society. 🐮 Today, 50% of habitable land is used for agriculture – three-quarters of that for animal proteins. By decoupling food production from agriculture, Farmless could produce an equal amount of protein using 500x less land. 🌳 As a result, Farmless could reforest and rewild 1 gigaton of emissions annually – a significant slice of the 5 gigatons needed to reach net zero. Read it for a 5 min history lesson and a glimpse into the future of food.

✨ Fresh fermer alert✨ We're excited that Bálint Magyar joined Farmless as Principal Software Engineer! With a background in biology, physics, robotics, drones and software, Bálint will further develop BrewBase (aka the Farmless Operating System). Bálint is a great fit to the team because he is action oriented and seeks out hard challenges. Not only did he work at two startups during his BS in Nanobiology, he also competed in the RoboCup and iGEM Competition. Welcome on board Bálint!

Farmless is proud to have received a €1 million grant by the EU regional development fund!   🏭 The funds will be used to validate our fermentation method for protein production without agricultural land in an operational environment.   ♻️ Our protein is locally brewed at the Farmless Brewery in Amsterdam, using food grade ingredients and a regionally produced, sustainable feedstock. #Kansen voor West #European Regional Development Fund

🚨 Exciting internship alert! 🚨 🌅 At Farmless we're creating better proteins with minimal land use. We use natural fermentation and a renewable-energy based feedstock to produce amino acid complete protein ingredients. 💡We're looking for excellent Fermentation Process Development interns who are intrinsically motived to work on the frontiers of food production. 🥛 You will support us in improving all aspects of the fermentation process. During this internship you will be a part of our experienced team. 🚀 We have a small, highly technical team (Vegetarian Butcher, DSM, Noma) and we're from all over the world. We're a bunch of optimists that want to make the future something worth getting excited about. 🇳🇱 We're based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Our brewery, R&D facilities, food application kitchen and offices are all integrated under a single roof - optimised for high speed iteration. Link to the application in the comments 👇