Power the World. Feed the People. Heal the Planet.

By coming up with innovative solutions for extending the usefulness of biomass materials, we can maximize resource efficiency and ensure that more food makes it into the mouths that need it.

We understand that education is key to solving the future of food and that proper nourishment is key to peoples' ability to learn! That is why our Agri-Clusters will include learning opportunities for students in kindergarten through PHD courses. By using a "Living Lab" concept, we can ensure that advancements are able to move throughout the organization in real time.

Agriculture is a major contributor to water pollution globally. Since anaerobic digestion can be used to process any volatile organics, including human waste, our goal is to be able to provide solutions efficiently processing human waste around the world. While our work begins in Canada, which is a developed county, we hope to provide places that do not have existing infrastructure with modules for processing human waste. Our mission is to transform all organic "waste" streams into safe sustainable materials.

Biogas is made from anaerobic digestion. It is a process that has been happening since the beginning of the Earth and has been done on an industrial scale since Word War II. While there are millions of small pot digesters being used in developing countries, which create light and cleaner cookstoves, our work aims to provide the resources need to scale these solutions down to create large family/small village sized installations.

There are times and places where a day's work won't provide enough money for a day's food. The solutions that we are developing will provide small groups of people with local food solutions. Even though we live in a time of rapidly changing technology, no one can predict what the world will look like in a decade, let alone in 2050. Since the need for food is an absolute, creating these opportunities for food production will allow us to ensure that basic human needs are being met.

The very nature of our program is embodied by this. We work with many different industries and sectors, using innovation to ensure that use of resources is being maximized. We use existing infrastructure when and where it is, look to optimize things, and to replace outdated systems if a better one exists.

Throughout modern history, urban communities have depended on rural communities to provide them with resources. By monitoring current practices that have existed for years and cutting-edge technological developments, we can find the most efficient answers for addressing resource related concerns. We anticipate that a combination of larger biorefineries on the outskirts of cities and closed containment systems for smaller, highly perishable foods will be produced in the future.

A beautiful visualization of what this might look like can be seen here.

If we had to choose a single sustainable development goal, this would be it. Since the need for nourishment is vital for all living creatures, food systems provide the best representation of sustainable development and how our current systems are incredibly inefficient. We have not arrived at these systems by being intentionally harmful but by having systems that have been developed slowly over time.

Many studies have been done and many reports have been written on the environmental impact of agriculture and the potential for biogas to reduce greenhouse gases. In our program, we bring meaningful action to air, soil, and water by replacing fossil energy and reducing land demand for foreign food production. Our solution will save trees, build soil carbon, and reduce water intensity. Our goal is to take the pressure of food production demand from billions of people off of Mother Earth.

Nutrient runoff from farming is a threat to the health of aquifers, streams, rivers, and oceans. This is because water demand from food production is draining aquifers and is causing saltwater to intrude into the fresh water of coastal communities. Nutrient runoff can also cause streams and rivers to dry up, wiping out fish habitats. Excessive nutrients can cause native plant and animal life to die off, leading to dead zones in large bodies of water. This, in turn, can cause the bodies of water to warm, feeding energy to tropical storms and turning them into hurricanes.

Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society has submitted a proposal to the 2019 Schmidt Marine Coastal Pollution Challenge.

Many parts of agricultural food production are now being exposed—deforestation, soil erosion/carbon content, poisonous weeds, chemical concentrations, and more. Earth Overshoot Day 2019 was July 29th. While there is no mathematical modeling that can show that what we are doing to the Earth is sustainable, Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Foundation did an excellent job of laying out the numbers in his 2011 TEDxWWF talk, "Feeding 9 Billion and Maintaining the Planet".

Together we are more than the sum of our parts. We recognize that we are addressing the Global Grand Challenges of Humanity and that every single person and animal needs nutrition. To provide this nutrition, we are currently destroying the only planet we have to live on, which is why everyone needs to come to the table to find a solution.

Our work uses True Cost Accounting (we look at technical, economic, and environmental aspects together), and we will use competitions to attract the most diverse groups of stakeholders possible, on the shortest possible timelines. By using "Outcome Driven Innovation", we ensure that we advance our goals intelligently. We are "Data Driven, Mission Focused", following milestones of the highest and best use.

There is room for all innovators to work with us, and we will be shining lights (prizes/rewards) on targets that they may not have thought have naturally. Symbiosis Centre and the NISP Canada Synergy Software lines up uncommon partnerships and gives us all a reason to get along. The survival of the planet and humanity depends on us getting this right!