SeedLinked

We're thrilled to see the work SeedLinked is enabling featured by The Washington Post! 🌱 As a safeguard against potential global food-related crises, there has always been an emphasis on preserving diverse crop varieties, even more so now with the effects of climate change. This early understanding of the value of agricultural diversity remains central to the mission that SeedLinked carries forward today. The Seed Savers Exchange 2025 ADAPT Program brings gardeners and farmers across the country together to trial crop varieties in varying climates and soils to protect heirloom plant varieties, ensure biodiversity, create more resilient crops, and secure the future of our food systems. #SeedLinked is powering these trials by aggregating thousands of grower insights on growth, yield, and resilience, enabling Seed Savers Exchange and ADAPT participants to share, analyze, and contribute valuable data to advance this mission. You can play a part in this work by getting involved in the 2025 ADAPT Program, which is open for registration through January. Gardeners and farmers of all skill levels and climates are encouraged to participate and experience SeedLinked’s innovative technology firsthand as they contribute valuable data. More information in the comments. Read more about this vital work and the passionate efforts of seed savers striving to keep biodiversity alive. 👇 🔗https://lnkd.in/gEpFuGA7

We're Thrilled to Announce Our Latest Investment: SeedLinked 🌱 Revolutionising the Seed Industry We're excited to welcome SeedLinked to the GEN-RE portfolio! Our largest investment to date highlights the incredible potential of this disruptive business. What is Seedlinked? Seedlinked is a decentralised seed social network platform that connects growers with breeders to share their insights, foster better locally adapted varieties and build trust within the agricultural community. Why SeedLinked? 🌱 Disrupting the seed industry: Seedlinked is disrupting the oligopoly seed industry that is currently bad for everyone, people, planet and flavour. 🌱 Decentralised Insights: 11,500 growers sharing insights across 55 crops, with over 250,000 total insights gathered 🌱 Building Resilient Food Systems: Addressing increased disease pressure due to climate change through collaborative innovation with 85 growers. 🌱 Partnerships for accelerated innovation : SeedLinked's collaborative model speeds up the R&D process, making it 2X faster and 5X cheaper than traditional methods 🌱 Empowering small scale growers: The platform gives voice and agency to the 60% of growers who produce 70% of our food but are often overlooked by the current industry. Welcome Nicolas Enjalbert and Seedlinked to GEN-RE, and thank you to all of the investors who are now part of the Seedlinked journey as they go on to raise their Series A. If you want to hear to more about Seedlinked, you can listen on GEN-RE's founder's and lead sponsor Koen van Seijen podcast Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food https://lnkd.in/dS8V8J_H #regenerativeagriculture #impactinvesting #agritech #seedinnovation #climatechange #foodsecurity #GENRE

Low cost and multi location phenomic at large scale is becoming more and more important in front of global change. Here is a great article on model we use at SeedLinked developed by Jacob van Etten. "Collaboration between scientists and farmers is always important in crop variety studies. That partnership is getting a boost thanks to a new kind of citizen science. Called the Triadic Comparison of Technology Options (tricot) approach, this simple but extremely practical and impressively effective strategy involves researchers providing seeds to a large number of farmers, who then plant the seeds, collect the production data, and report their observations back to the scientists." SeedLinked integrated the tricot model within its trialing tools. https://lnkd.in/eNjTxvrr

Earlier this year, Regenerative Food Systems Investment (RFSI) put out a call for pitch applications for the annual RFSI Forum, to be held October 9-10 in Denver. Together with partners, The First Thirty, RFSI aimed to find the hottest early-stage solutions for accelerating regeneration. In a commanding representation of the incredible mindpower working to solve for agriculture and food systems transformation, there were nearly 60 applications submitted for the pitch session – all vying for the four pitching spots available in this year’s program. 🥁 And (drum roll…) introducing the top four pitch finalists who will be pitching at this year’s RFSI Forum:   ➪ SeedLinked helps growers make better seed choices by allowing to explore vegetable seeds by filtering traits that are important to the grower and their production system. Welcome to data-driven seed search.   ➪ Susterre is pioneering the use of ultra-high pressure water jets in row crop planting applications. Their technology promotes regenerative practices like no-till farming and cover crops on a permanent basis, lowers the costs of planting and adds time to the farmer’s planting window.   ➪ Range Revolution ‘’The world’s first regenerative leather luggage and handbag company,’’ has rebuilt a regenerative, regional leather supply chain. The products’ design is intended to make consumers think about how they are intentionally created and put a dent into the 5 million hides wasted annually in the USA alone.   ➪ Rooted helps people put a nutritious, locally grown meal on their table in 30 minutes or less with their Real Meal Bundles. Easy recipes and products gathered from the best farms are delivered to consumers through bundles & subscriptions.

"Why does biodiversity matter?" It's amazing to see the ADAPT project, which we've been working on for the past five years in collaboration with Seed Savers Exchange, featured in The Washington Post! Biodiversity is at the heart of resilient and sustainable agriculture, and we're proud to contribute to preserving and promoting it for future generations. Multiple strong initiatives with Seed Bank are coming up. Stay tuned! washingtonpost.com. https://lnkd.in/gEpFuGA7

The Crop Diversity Dilemma: A Crucial Challenge for Climate Change Adaptation For the past six years, I have been deeply involved in addressing crop diversity, a passion that has driven my thinking for over 15 years in my breeding journey. Through SeedLinked, we have embarked on a journey to empower breeders and dealers, reducing R&D costs and accelerating adoption. Our results consistently demonstrate that collaborative breeding, supported by a digital ecosystem, is both efficient/accurate and very cost-effective. However, I see two main hurdles that institutions and policymakers need to prioritize: Business Model Innovation: A diverse seed ecosystem often results in low volume per variety, leading to low revenue and making it unsustainable for seed innovators and breeders. We need a supply chain approach that redistributes margins from consumers to breeders. This can be achieved through incentives, more economic and business research, and novel financing models. Emphasizing business research is crucial, potentially more so than novel statistical models, new gene editing processes, or cheaper sequencing. Narrative and Perception: Humans are driven by stories. Currently, the dominant narrative is technocratic, focused on control and homogeneity. In contrast, diversity is perceived as chaotic and less controlled. While SeedLinked has proven solutions, adoption remains slow because our narrative isn’t the mainstream. Technologies like drones, automation, and genomics are more appealing, despite promoting further homogeneity due to high capital needs and scalability requirements. (FYI this post was edited by AI 🤣) Where do we go from here?1/ We need more innovative investments (slow and new structure like work done by The Nest Family Office, Elemental Excelerator and Jordan Kraft Lambert) directed towards seed innovators like Adrien Pelletier and SeedLinked. What about a long term fund investing in a breeding project? 2/More communication to slowly change the story like Koen van Seijen work Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food. By shifting the focus and resources, we can enhance the adoption of diverse, sustainable agricultural practices essential for climate change adaptation.

💡 A poster summarising our conversation with Nicolas Enjalbert, CEO of SeedLinked, an innovative company digitizing collaborative breeding and a seed breeder, about our current #seed system, #flavour and #nutrients, collaborative seed #research, and much more. With Nicolas, part of the Nutrient Density in Food series, we discussed how to disrupt the oligopoly seeds industry, that's currently bad for everyone, people, planet and flavour. Nutrient Density in Food series: https://lnkd.in/dS8V8J_H Nicolas' interview, links and show notes: https://lnkd.in/dS8V8J_H Short animated video on Youtube (by Irena Atkovska): https://lnkd.in/dT_cn3r5

It is that time of year again! Our team of university researchers is seeking Midwestern (WI, IL, IN, and MI) grower-cooperators to conduct #hemp variety trials in 2024 via funding from #USDA SAC-NIFA and #SARE! Grain? Fiber? Flower? We have opportunities available for hemp growers of all types as we develop partnerships with some of the premier genetics providers in the industry! Worried about input costs? All seed and associated shipping costs are covered as part of the program. Growers simply need to be licensed and collect basic agronomic data throughout the season using SeedLinked. Some growers may even qualify for a $500 stipend! Interested growers and seed providers can learn more by reaching out here or at palberti@wisc.edu! The Midwestern Hemp Research Collaborative (MHRC) is comprised of researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and Michael Fields Agricultural Institute.

"The problem with most of the thinking in agricultural equipment today is that it follows one path and is oriented toward the past - it assumes that the way we farm today will be the way we will farm forever." SwarmFarm Robotics is building the future of autonomous ag. Check it out!

"Over the last 30 years, nearly a third of the country’s public plant breeding programs have been shut down". We must build a systemic change in the seed/ag/food industry and build infrastructure enabling the growth of highly diverse, local food systems. It starts with seed. It starts with a web of local seed sci-fi writers- breeders- innovators like The Utopian Seed Project. The current seed industry infrastructure is built for large homogeneous market. It cannot develop variety for niche market, with low volume and low revenue. High EBITA is driving the boat. At SeedLinked we believe that giving capacity to local breeders to collaboratively breed at a fraction of the cost with their growers and have rapid strong adoption is part of the solution. https://lnkd.in/dJeezyeT