Sometimes answering a long-standing question is the question of finding a new perspective.
Take methane from cows: For years, people have been trying to remove gas from cow burps to limit the impact of livestock on the climate. But they don’t make dents. That’s because they saw the problem from the perspective of climate scientists, not farmers.
But Kathryn Polkoff, co-founder and CEO of Hoofprint Biome, thinks more like a farmer on the issue.
“The first time I heard about this problem with methane was Animal Science 101,” Porkov, a doctoral degree in animal science, told TechCrunch. It is not the context of climate change, not the context of animal health and productivity.
Porkov and her co-founder Scott Collins have stumbled over a new way to use enzymes to modify the cow’s microbiota and reduce methane while increasing the nutrients available to cows.
The discovery netted Hoofprint a $15 million Series A round led by SOSV. Other participating investors include Agrizeronz, Alexandria Venture Investments, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Groundbreaking Energy Fellows, Good Growth Capital, Ponderosa Ventures and Twynam. The new round will help companies try out the enzyme on their farms.
“We breed for thousands of years to make the animals as efficient as possible and increase yields, but there have been few attempts to change the microbiome,” she said. “It’s like you’re engineering a car, but you’ve never changed the engine. That’s where all the energy comes from.”
Hoofprint’s feed additives regulate the microbiota of cattle stomachs and suppress the growth of microorganisms that produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that warms the planet 84 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide.
Rumen is the “Hodgepodge Assence Line,” said Po Bronson, general partner at SOSV, who led the company’s investment in Hoofprint. Beef eaters tend to be very difficult to digest and extract nutrients. For thousands of years, cows evolved along with the complex microbiota of their skin, breaking down feed and releasing nutrients in the process.
Cows absorb some of those nutrients, but not all. Another group of microorganisms steal some of these nutrients and produce methane as a by-product, in order to promote their own growth at the expense of cows. “It’s a very specific subset of the microorganisms that make methane,” Porkov said.
Hoofprint enzymes suppress these microorganisms. Startups use yeast to make enzymes, just like how other industrial enzymes are made, including those used in cheese, detergents and other products.
For SOSV’s Bronson, the fact that Hoofprint’s enzyme comes from Rumen itself was important. When a large food company announced its trial in the UK in December, Bovaer, one of its previous methane-reducing products, faced a wave of disinformation.
He doesn’t think Hoofprint will face the same backlash. “The core concept is that their products are natural proteins. They deteriorate just like any other proteins that animals eat. They are natural to the ru stomach.”
Hoofprint is targeting a 5% improvement in “feed efficiency,” Polkoff said.
By increasing the efficiency of cow rumen, Bronson believes Hoofprint will be successful in farmers where other startups have failed. “It’s the table stakes that knock down methane,” he said. “Making it more productive is what they pay for.”