High-impact projects fighting biodiversity loss

By Iska Knuuttila, Tandena Wagner @ 2025-11-15T15:05 (+24)

Cross-post from the EcoResilience Initiative blog.

Recently we highlighted precision fermentation as our top biodiversity intervention due to its potential to permanently reduce deforestation within 5-10 years. The fact that it is currently underfunded, is highly scalable, is at a stage with high leverage, and could have a massive global impact makes it stand out above other methods to reduce future biodiversity loss. But within the domain of “precision fermentation” where is the best place to send donations? What efforts within this industry are most targeted towards biodiversity preservation?

Terra Bioindustries is doing exactly the right work, but they're not set up for donations at this time. If you are looking for a place to donate right now, you can give to the Good Food Institute here, which supports the broader field. (If you donate, we request that you add a comment mentioning ERI in your donation or tell us you donated, so we can track our effect. Thank you for making the world a better place!)

How we Chose: Current Bottlenecks

There are several important blocks holding back the development of precision fermentation into a dominant food source. Here is a well-composed list of the current unsolved obstacles. (Briefly, they are: sugar feedstock, microbial strains, bioreactors, fermentation processes, valorization, and downstream processing.) Sugar feedstock may be the biggest one - half the price of operation for precision fermentation is from sugar input. And sugar demand is going to rise to more than double current global production according to Synthesis Capital. 

Particularly for biodiversity, removing the need for sugar crops would reduce conversion of biodiverse areas to cropland due to reduced cattle and cattle feed production. Precision fermentation is a net positive for global extinction reduction, even with sugarcane feedstock. This holds true across all levels of market penetration - it causes positive land use change for biodiverse continents. Still, sugarcane is currently mostly grown in India, Brazil and Thailand - and if demand increases, it risks expanding to other tropical regions. This is a biodiversity threat we can foresee and avoid, while also increasing the speed that precision fermentation expands.

To make massive amounts of sugar, it is important to use a plentiful and cheap resource, and a similarly low-cost process. Beating current sugar crops is a tall order, but it will need to happen to compete with other protein sources. Here is Good Food Institute’s deep dive on feedstock production. Agricultural waste is the prime target here, primarily because of its size.

The Contenders

A few companies are working on sugar yields - Terra Bioindustries in particular is doing exactly what we are looking for - they are isolating sugar from ag-waste (corn stover and brewers spent grains). Other important actors are: Hyfé, which is producing low-cost sugars from water waste. And Fibenol is producing sugars from wood-waste. Pow.Bio is another interesting company, with their “continuous fermentation” technology halving costs.

Terra Bioindustries' direction is most exciting to us. Their goal is mass production, not expensive, specialized, small batch proteins. They are producing both sugar from ag-waste, and mycoprotein. They estimate that their protein flour will cost more than most soy protein but less than most pea protein. Their mycoprotein is “incomplete” - this means it is missing one of the nine essential amino acids (specifically: lysine). Their more important project from our perspective is refining sugar from corn stover and brewers spent barley grains. Corn stover is especially good, because it is the highest volume ag-waste. Both protein and sugar are valuable, but for advancing precision fermentation, it is the work on sugar that is most exciting to us at ERI. 

There are some drawbacks to Terra Bioindustries sugar production process. Their sugar, “recyclose” contains both glucose and xylose. Pure glucose (C6 sugars) is desirable for fermentation. Xylose (C5 sugars) is much less accessible, and including xylose can slow down the process of fermenting. To be clear, producing a mixture of C5/C6 is typical for ag-waste feedstocks; it is an unsolved issue. One proposed solution is engineering microbes to use C5. This would help precision fermentation be more sugar-efficient, but optimizing microbe strains to produce protein already has many constraints. Using microbe strains which are already optimized for other traits is crucial to bringing costs down and improving production efficiency. Terra Bioindustries says that their sugar “recyclose” is indistinguishable from glucose for some precision fermenters. But they may be testing with microbe strains that are capable of digesting C5 xylose sugars. 

Despite these drawbacks, we believe Terra Bioindustries presents a transformative opportunity. Their goals closely match our strategic priorities for advancement in precision fermentation biotech. There are few other companies or labs working on this specific problem. At their current stage, funding would have outsized impact - they are scaling production to demonstrate commercial viability by 2027 and are looking for $5 million to reach this milestone. Last year they came in 6th out of 1000 entries to The Livability Challenge. Early-stage investment now could determine whether they accelerate to commercialization or are forced to end their development trajectory altogether. Their performance has a chance to kick-start ag-waste feedstocks as a viable option, bringing the costs down for precision fermentation and preventing tropical forest loss from happening.

Please note, that this is only an outside view: We haven't checked with the organizations about their situation, eg. if they already have secured enough funding, or how exactly are their expectations for the future. To really make a reliable donation recommendation, we should also check that part and form a well-informed opinion on their team and plan. But that takes more time and work. This is how far we got for now. 

Another limiting factor is that we aren't a fund, so there's not much we can promise to them in exchange for their time and potentially secret data.

Recent Breakthroughs

A few researchers are also working on sugar yield science. NREL has a division with several top scientists working on the problem. 

In particular Xiaowen Chen, now of the University of Minnesota, recently participated in a breakthrough where their process using corn stover might produce sugar at 28 cents/lb (low-end estimate). For comparison global sugar price varies from 10-25 cents/lb, and is higher (35 cents/lb) in protected markets. This is a cutting edge development, published July 2025, 4 months ago.

Hongzhang Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is working on some low-cost methods to break down lignocellulose (plant matter) to free up the sugars more easily using “steam explosion.” Steam explosion is probably more cost effective than specialized enzyme mixes. 

Jake Lindstrom at the FDA also studied sugar yield from fast pyrolysis. 

Donate Now?

Unfortunately we don’t know of a way to easily donate directly to the above impactful initiatives. We at ERI want to make it easy to support this groundbreaking work, and will do what we can to provide access to interested donors as soon as we are able. Any updates will be posted here. If you are a big donor and want to take initiative, you can contact Terra Bioindustries by reaching out to Rebecca Palmer directly or using their contact form. Alternatively, you can reach Xiaowen Chen here, Hongzhang Chen here, and Jake Lindstrom here.

However, if you just want to donate today, an easy way to do so is to give to the Good Food Institute. The main reason to do so is that they are trying to funnel money, talent, and information to where it will bring alternative proteins to mass adoption. We penciled an estimate that every $6,800,000 given to the Good Food Institute will result in one more species being saved from extinction in the next 200 years. (If you donate, we request that you add a comment mentioning ERI in your donation or email us or tell us you donated, so we can track our effect. And thank you for improving our future!)

The main caveats are that the Good Food Institute is not directly concerned with biodiversity consequences, and is not prioritizing transitioning away from sugar-crop feedstocks. They are not directly supporting Terra Bioindustries nor the other scientists I have mentioned here. 

Good Food Institute does support ag-waste processing including Hyfé in a general way, although they prioritize other areas. We were able to rapidly gain in-depth understanding of the industry, key bottlenecks and leverage points using their documentation. They connect scientists, companies, funders, and provide comprehensive and accurate reports which inform decision-making. They are pushing alt-proteins forward and shortening timelines. Without their work, the field would be less informed, connected, funded, and much more neglected. They also have a grant program which channels money where they believe it will most effectively bring alternative proteins to mass adoption. For further evidence see Giving Green’s 2025 analysis (recently released!), Animal Charity Evaluator’s 2023 analysis, and Charity Entrepreneurship’s 2025 recommendation.

Good Food Institute has a donate button here. (Thank you for making a difference!)

Please consider sharing this analysis with others interested in effective giving, or who want to learn about high-impact conservation interventions.

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