Israeli agricultural innovations will keep the world fed

Chemical engineer Dganit Vered discovered something that shifted her entire career focus when she led a multinational R&D team of 250 employees for Israeli seed breeder Hazera from 2015 to 2017.

"When I traveled around the world and met my team members, I saw the problems were much bigger than could be solved through the seeds," she tells ISRAEL21c.

Having worked for 17 years at Intel Israel and then in pharma and seed company R&D, Vered thought she could help.

Last May, she became CEO of Smart Agro Fund, a public R&D partnership founded in 2020 to advance startups addressing big problems in agriculture. (This must be her destiny: dganit is a flower growing near grain fields, and vered is a rose.)

With the world population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, growers must produce more food under increasingly difficult conditions: extreme weather and severe shortages of labor, water, pollinating bees and arable land.

"At the end of the day, we will need to increase yields by about 50 percent, with 50 percent less resources, in order to feed the world," Vered says. "That's where we are heading with climate change."

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Photo by Abdelrahman Ismail on Unsplash

Source: Israel 21C