Dr. Tony Michaels
CEO, EVEA Farm Management
Adjunct Professor, USC, MEB

Farming for Health and Scale

Tuesday, November 5, 2024
11:30 AM
AHF 153 (Torrey Webb Room)

My life has involved overlapping careers in academia, investing, business and farming. Three features provide commonality across these careers. 1. Science provides opportunity to improve our life on earth and I choose to take a measure of personal responsibility for making that improvement happen. 2. Difficult and worthwhile changes usually involve complex adaptive systems. 3. Scale is critical and finding good scaling mechanisms should occur at the start of an innovation process, not the end. My main goals are increasing the nutrient density of food and the profitability of the farming and food delivery systems that provide for better human health. Our farming systems focus on using biology, instead of chemistry to create nutrient-dense foods. However, the key innovations are in building vertically-integrated supply chains to retain that nutritional value from crop to plate, ensuring that the value rewards the farmers, brands and consumers who create that value instead of intermediaries that disproportionately extract value in the interest of efficiency. While the current learnings are in land-based farming, similar innovations are required to scale health innovations based on seafood and aquaculture.

Hosts: Dr. Douglas Capone & Dr. Linda Duguay