The moonshot approach to sustainable food production

Kobe beef. Matsuzaka beef. Omi beef. All are variants of Japan’s Wagyu beef, renowned the world over for its exquisite marbling and succulent texture. As a cultural and culinary phenomenon, Wagyu beef is staying firmly on the menu.

But Japan’s high-tech agricultural sector is building a future where menus will increasingly also include lab-grown meat and soy-based meat substitutes; where ‘smart pills’ will be used to monitor methane emissions in the cattle that are still farmed; and where microbial fertilizers will nourish both crops and the soil.

Those developments are all part of an initiative launched in 2020 under the auspices of the Japanese Moonshot Research and Development Program. Currently, the initiative aims to tackle ten of the gravest challenges facing humanity. ‘A sustainable global food supply’ is Goal 5.

There’s a lot to be done to achieve it. Global food systems currently account for up to 37% of greenhouse emissions, with a significant proportion coming from farming. What’s more, the global population is due to increase by 25% by 2050, so things will get worse without urgent action.

Challenging, high-impact research is the hallmark of the Moonshot programme. But it will take more than technical fixes to make food supply systems sustainable, according to Kazuhiro Chiba, from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, who leads Moonshot Goal 5. That’s why the Goal 5 project is also working to accelerate uptake of any technology it develops.

“We have already established start-up companies around many advances, to encourage business-oriented action and investment, so that these technologies become accepted by the market,” he says. Chiba is an old hand at transforming research into real-world change. As an organic chemist, he founded Jitsubo, a company that commercialized a cost-effective technique for synthesizing medicinal peptides.

Several of the eight Goal 5 Moonshot teams, involving upwards of 700 researchers, are in discussion with Japanese companies, says Chiba, who explains that commercialization is not just about money, but about driving uptake of their technology.

Measured steps

At the same time, Goal 5 teams are working to remove barriers to good regulation that would drive more sustainable food production. One such barrier is monitoring, the Achilles heel of many emission reduction programmes.

Take methane-producing cows. They are responsible for roughly 10% of the world’s human-driven methane, a key greenhouse gas. While there are ways to reduce those emissions, such as feed additives and antibiotics, monitoring their impact is difficult, which makes regulation hard.

To tackle that problem, a Moonshot team led by biosensor engineer Toshihiro Itoh of the University of Tokyo, is developing a ‘smart pill’ that is administered to cows, which is then used to measure indicators of methane produced in their largest stomach. The pill’s measurements will be used to estimate emissions for farms, which in turn can be used to measure the effectiveness of different methane-reducing interventions, and — eventually — to monitor compliance with regulations.

Other methane-monitoring approaches exist, but according to Chiba, they are either impractical on the farm — for example, using a cow mask to capture emissions — or difficult to roll out globally — for example, using satellites to measure methane.

“We need one or two methods for measuring methane, so that we can standardize the system for encouraging reduction,” Chiba explains. “A measurement system is important to meaningfully reduce global emissions from cattle.”

Methane is not the only monitoring challenge the Goal 5 Moonshot initiative will tackle. Soil captures huge amounts of carbon in organic matter and in carbonates. But its capacity is being steadily reduced by agricultural activity, with 90% of topsoil at risk of degradation and erosion by 2050.

According to the 2023 UN International Panel for Climate Change report, agriculture would respond quickly to carbon-price setting, with the better management of carbon sequestered in crop and grazing land having huge potential to reduce emissions. The soil carbon measurement system produced by a Moonshot team, led by Satoshi Wada, at Japan’s national research institute, RIKEN, could be a catalyst for standardizing measurements to enable a soil carbon pricing system, says Chiba.

Other Goal 5 teams are tackling the root cause of soil degradation. A team led by Haruko Takeyama, a microbiologist at Waseda University, in Tokyo, is developing ways to use soil microbes to promote soil health and to fertilize crops without chemical fertilizers, which degrade the soil.

In keeping with the Japanese Moonshot ethos, the teams working on Goal 5 think big. For example, a team led by Tatsuya Shimizu at Tokyo Women's Medical University is making lab-grown meat greener.

One way they are doing this is by using an algae-based media as a low-carbon source of energy for growing cells. Their aim is to help replace some of the meat from methane-emitting livestock with sustainably produced lab-grown meat. Takeyama’s team is also focussed on developing sustainable ways to farm soybean, the basis of many meat substitutes.

To Chiba, taking the Moonshot Goal 5 research from discovery to impact can’t happen soon enough. “We want to establish these technologies, not by 2050 or 2030, but as soon as possible,” he says.