In 2022, Valley partner Canton of Fribourg launched a new agri-food strategy. Just months later, their team, supported by fellow Valley partner Cluster Food & Nutrition, has worked alongside countless local partners to transform the words on the page into a series of practical projects.

Valley partner, the Canton of Fribourg, has a strong agri-food sector ecosystem. Both agricultural and industrial, with a dense network of SMEs and leading national and international companies, the canton processes nearly a quarter of Swiss agricultural products.

In 2022, Fribourg defined a new agri-food strategy that set out a new ecosystem led approach, requiring all local actors to change the way they think about how they work within the food system and consider their contribution to driving a shift towards a more sustainable and a circular economy. 

Since then, fellow Valley partner Cluster Food & Nutrition has been working to deliver this new strategy, powered by a CHF 1 million budget. Throughout 2022, a number of interdisciplinary teams worked in close collaboration with leading local and regional companies to develop projects relating to each of the strategy’s priority areas. Let’s take a deep dive into the results of two of the resulting projects, developed in collaboration with 10 ecosystem actors.   

Circular Functionalized Proteins – adding value to agricultural by-products

👩‍🦰 Who

• BFH-HAFL
• HES-SO Valais // Wallis
• Alver
• SNHF
• University of Fribourg
• Translait

💡 The opportunity

Partners saw an opportunity to transform local byproducts into circular ingredients.

🤩 The findings

Sugar beet leaves, a by-product of sugar production, can be used as a nutrient source for growing microalgae, a source of local, sustainable plant protein. Microalgae could then be used to create sustainable meat and dairy substitutes.

Dairy co-products such as whey and buttermilk, complexed with vitamin E from wheat bran oil, improve the assimilation of this micronutrient. Such a prototype can be extended to a wide range of molecules of interest for health, opening the way to new nutritional complexes with high added value.

🎤 A few words from one of the partners

Commenting on the project, Serge Rezzi from the Swiss Nutrition and Health Foundation (SNHF) said: “This project has made it possible to bring together the various players involved in innovation throughout the agri-food sector. That’s something that can’t be done without an inclusive approach that includes all the players in the sector.”

Optimised Nitrogen Fertilisation: New technologies to drive biodiversity

👩‍🦰 Who

• Grangeneuve
• Agroscope
• BFH-HAFL
• Agridea

💡 The opportunity

Partners recognised that there was an opportunity to develop a predictive tool capable of making targeted recommendations to farmers by accurately calculating the nitrogen requirements of their crops. Thanks to multispectral imagery by drone, this method would make it possible to optimise the quantities of fertiliser products used while guaranteeing good yields and optimum crop quality.

🤩 The findings

The findings suggest that the application of these approaches can help to preserve the environment while optimising yields. The results of the study showed that the quantities of nitrogen applied were generally between -40% and +10% compared with fertilisation standards, while improving nitrogen efficiency without significantly reducing yields.

This project demonstrated how data and digital technologies can be used to strengthen efficiency in agriculture and the food industry more broadly. The project findings could offer significant benefits for farmers, both in terms of yield and sustainability, and in economic terms, by reducing the need for nitrogen fertilisers.

🎤 A few words from one of the partners

Commenting on the project, Aurélie Moulin-Moix from Grangeneuve said: “The project allows us to optimise nitrogen fertilisation, reducing farmers’ production costs and increasing their profits. Applying only the nitrogen that is needed also reduces Swiss agriculture’s dependence on world fertiliser markets. From an ecological point of view, fixing nitrogen from the air requires a lot of energy, thus, reducing the amount of nitrogen applied saves a lot of energy. What’s more, applying too much nitrogen leads to pollution in the form of greenhouse gases and contamination of groundwater by nitrates, which can make local water sources unfit for consumption.”

Based in Fribourg and have an idea for a project?

A total sum of CHF 200,000 is available to support innovative collaborative projects, with a strong potential for economic impact and on the sustainability of the agri-food sector.  You can submit your project here by November 19. Or maybe you’re looking to develop a new solution? A total amount of CHF 45,000 is available to support ideas and projects in the start-up or prototyping phase. You can find out more and apply to benefit from an Innovation cheque here.

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Many experts recognise the potential of vertical farming in enabling sustainable, local food production. But what more can be done to further reduce costs and boost product quality and affordability? A joint Innosuisse research project between Valley partners YASAI AG, Agroscope, fenaco, and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) is working on answering this question.

The challenge

Climate change, population growth, and loss of arable land threaten the resilience of global and local food systems. Recent events – from the COVID pandemic to the war in Ukraine – have further exacerbated pressures on agricultural value chains, leading to a global rise in food prices.

The opportunity

Swiss start-up YASAI is on a mission to tackle these challenges and democratize access to local, high-quality food, produced sustainably thanks to its soilless, vertical farming system.

Back in 2021, the YASAI team realized that if vertical farms are to become a key part of the smart cities of the future, we need to invest in optimizing the sustainability, quantity, quality, and profitability of operations today. They saw that much of the knowledge we need to do this is readily available, but it’s spread across several companies and stakeholders. So they teamed up with experts at fenaco, Agroscope, and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences to kick off a 3-year partnership project, supported by an investment of close to 1M Swiss Francs sourced from industrial partners and Innosuisse.

The solution

Project partners identified four fields of research that would help to explore vertical farming’s potential to secure local food production in the future:

1. Sustainability
   The Ecotechnologies and Energy Systems Research Unit at ZHAW is focused on reducing YASAI’s environmental footprint by investigating substrate quality and exploring the selection of light and fertilizer profiles. The ZHAW team led by Dr. Zala Schmautz will then assess the impact of these measures using the life cycle assessment (LCA) method. 

2. Quality
   Agroscope, the Swiss Institute for Agricultural Research, will zone in on improvements relating to yield and quality. Agroscope experts Gil Carron and Dr. Christoph Carlen will lead a comparative study of different crop cultivation systems.

3. Packaging solutions
   ZHAW’s Food Packaging Research Group at the Institute of Food and Beverage Innovation will explore sustainable and innovative packaging technologies. Prof. Dr. Selçuk Yildirim’s team will focus on selecting sustainable packaging materials and identifying processes and designs that have a lower environmental impact, without compromising the quality of the products.

4. Profitability
   Working closely with fenaco and ZHAW’s Institute of Natural Resource Sciences, YASAI will also work on improving farm profitability to strengthen the business opportunity for farmers.

The results

In the first year of the project, partners tested different growing substrates that would reduce the farm wastes, different varieties of selected herbs to find the most optimal varieties for indoor cultivation, as well as different packaging options that would make packaging more sustainable and at the same time, attractive for the customer. In this context, packaging made of leftover basil plants had been designed and might be a potential solution further down the development process.

The project will now run until March 2025. The YASAI team will use the findings to inform how they develop their operations.

A few words from the partners

Commenting on the collaboration, Eldrid Funck, Head of Brand and Marketing from YASAI said: “This project enables us to improve on various levels. It’s a great opportunity to collaborate with professional research institutes and integrate their findings perpetually. As a startup, we don’t have the resources to do research on this scale.”

Dr. Christoph Carlen from Agroscope added: “Optimising this production system is very important on the road to profitability and sustainability. This involves finding the most suitable plants and varieties for vertical farming, determining the optimal management of the plants, and robotizing harvesting and packaging as much as possible”.

Daniel Schwab, Project Leader for vertical farming at fenaco went on to say: “The key to profitability lies in scalability and automatization of the processes. We currently produce relatively small volumes and selected products but aim at increasing these step by step”.

Dr. Zala Schmautz, Project Leader said: “With all the current problems that we are facing from climate change to resource availability, local food production independent of outside climate will be even more important in the future. And if at the same time, we can save on space by growing it vertically, reuse the resources such as heat, and make it more sustainable even better!”

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