Westport, CT, USA
Terra Nova Seeds uses non-GMO breeding to adapt crops for vertical farms. By optimizing biology for better light and nutrient absorption in indoor hydroponic environments, we cut energy costs and boost crop yields.
Ideation
6 months - 1 year
$12,500.00
Last update: October 05, 2023
The world is currently navigating a global food security crisis that threatens the stability of modern civilization. According to the 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, an estimated 673 million people -- approximately 8.2% of the global population -- faced chronic hunger in 2024. Despite decades of technological advancement, we have essentially been set back 15 years, with undernourishment levels comparable to those of 2008-2009. The crisis is not merely about a lack of food, but a lack of accessible, affordable, and nutritious food. Over 2.3 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity last year, meaning they lacked regular access to enough safe and nutritious food to lead an active life.
This crisis is driven by three interlocking shocks -- Conflict, Climate Change, and Economic Volatility. Conflict remains the primary driver, disrupting supply chains and destroying agricultural livelihoods in regions like Sudan and Gaza. Simultaneously, climate change-related extreme weather --droughts, floods, and unpredictable rainfall -- now serves as the primary driver of acute hunger in 18 countries, affecting nearly 100 million people. As traditional "breadbasket" regions face a projected 24% decline in staple crop yields by 2100, the global food system must undergo a radical transformation. We can no longer rely on a system that is one climate disaster away from collapse; we need local, resilient, and energy-efficient food production models that can thrive within urban centers, independent of the volatile outdoor environment.
In response to this crisis, vertical farming and Controlled-Environment Agriculture (CEA) have emerged as essential solutions for urban resilience. These systems offer a 365-day growing season, use up to 95% less water than traditional farming, and eliminate the need for chemical pesticides and fertilizers. However, there is a fundamental paradox: while vertical farming is designed to be the future of sustainable agriculture, its current reliance on massive amounts of electricity threatens its very purpose. To produce food locally, we have traded the "free" energy of the sun for high-cost, carbon-intensive energy from LEDs powered by the electrical grid.
The scale of this challenge is vast. The vertical farming market is projected to reach $33 billion by 2030, yet many pioneers have struggled due to unsustainable operating expenses. Energy consumption typically accounts for 30% to 40% of a vertical farm’s operating costs. This is not just a financial hurdle; it is a scalability crisis. High energy costs prevent indoor farming from moving beyond "luxury" greens into the staple crops required to feed a hungry planet. As long as indoor farming remains energy-intensive, it cannot fulfill its potential as a tool for global food security.
The primary driver of this energy crisis is a profound "biological mismatch" that the industry has largely ignored. Crops evolved over millennia to grow outdoors where sunlight is abundant and free of cost. They evolved to grow in soil where nutrients are sparsely distributed. Indoor environments are fundamentally different -- light must be supplied by LEDs which consume energy and plants are generally grown in water based hydroponic solutions.
A. Evolutionary Misalignment The crops currently used in high-tech vertical farms are the same varieties bred for outdoor, soil-based agriculture. These plants are evolutionarily programmed for a world that does not exist inside a warehouse. Outdoor varieties are bred for traits like pest resistance and sturdy stalks to withstand wind -- traits that are irrelevant in a controlled indoor environment.
B. Photosynthetic Inefficiency In a vertical farm, sunlight is replaced by LED arrays. While LEDs are more efficient than ever, the plants themselves are not optimized to absorb this specific, static light source. Because their chlorophyll density is tuned for the sun's intensity, they fail to capture light efficiently at lower intensities. To compensate, farms "over-light" their crops, running LEDs at higher intensities than should be necessary. This creates a cycle of waste: more light leads to more heat, requiring more energy-intensive HVAC cooling.
C. Hydroponic Stress The root systems of outdoor crops are designed to search through soil for nutrients. When placed in a hydroponic system where nutrients are delivered through water, these structures become inefficient. The plant spends biological energy maintaining roots meant for soil rather than optimizing for the rapid, direct nutrient uptake possible in a liquid medium.
Carbon Footprint: When vertical farms rely on non-renewable energy grids, the carbon footprint of "local" indoor lettuce can actually exceed that of outdoor lettuce shipped thousands of miles.
Food Insecurity: Because of high costs, indoor produce is often priced as a premium product. This excludes residents in "food deserts" who lack access to affordable nutrition.
Infrastructure Waste: Innovation is currently focused almost exclusively on hardware -- better lights and sensors. These are "band-aid" solutions that try to fix a biological problem with mechanical tools.
Terra Nova Seeds addresses this challenge at its biological root. By targeting a 50% improvement in light absorption and nutrient uptake through non-GMO selective breeding, we aim to lower the "energy floor" of the entire industry. This shift moves vertical farming from a niche technology into a viable, low-carbon foundation for the global food supply, making fresh produce affordable and accessible to all.
Terra Nova Seeds addresses the economic and environmental bottlenecks of indoor agriculture by shifting the focus from mechanical and electric infrastructure to biological optimization. While the industry has spent billions of dollars perfecting LED hardware and automated climate controls, these technologies are still being used to grow crops that are evolutionarily "mismatched" for indoor life. Our solution is the development of non-GMO, indoor-optimized crop varieties specifically bred to thrive in hydroponic systems and under artificial lighting. By improving the plant itself, we enable vertical farms to reduce their largest operating expense -- energy -- without requiring expensive capital reinvestment.
Our breeding approach targets three critical physiological pathways that directly influence the resource efficiency of indoor crops:
Chlorophyll Density and Light Capture: Standard outdoor crops evolved for the high-intensity, broad-spectrum light of the sun. In a vertical farm, LED light is often delivered in specific, narrow spectrums at lower intensities to save energy. We select for varieties with increased chlorophyll density and optimized leaf structures that capture more usable energy under these lower LED intensities. This allows farms to dim their lights or shorten photoperiods without sacrificing growth rates.
Photosynthetic Enzyme Concentration: Photosynthesis is governed by enzymes such as Rubisco, which are often the limiting factor in growth. In the stable, CO2-enriched, and climate-controlled environment of a vertical farm, we can optimize the concentration and efficiency of these enzymes to maximize biomass accumulation per unit of light absorbed.
Root Architecture for Hydroponics: Traditional root systems are designed to navigate soil and resist drought. In hydroponic systems, where nutrients are delivered via water, these structures are redundant and energy-intensive to maintain. Our varieties feature root architectures optimized for rapid nutrient uptake from liquid mediums, ensuring the plant directs more biological energy into edible biomass (leaves and stems) rather than unnecessary root mass.
Together, these targets aim for up to a 50% improvement in effective light absorption and nutrient uptake efficiency.
To achieve these goal, Terra Nova Seeds utilizes a modern, data-driven breeding methodology that accelerates the traditional timeline of selective crossbreeding.
Selective Non-GMO Crossbreeding: We rely on natural variation within plant species, using established crossbreeding techniques to ensure our products are non-GMO and widely acceptable to consumers and regulatory bodies.
Genotype-to-Phenotype Mapping: Rather than relying solely on observable physical traits (phenotypes), we use genotype-based selection. By identifying specific genetic markers linked to high performance in indoor environments, we can predict which plant crosses will be most successful before they are even grown to maturity. This creates a compounding dataset that serves as a proprietary knowledge base for future crop development.
Speed Breeding Techniques: Under highly controlled indoor conditions, we utilize "speed breeding" -- manipulating light and temperature cycles to trigger faster flowering and seed production. This allows us to complete multiple generations in a single year, significantly reducing the time it takes to bring a new, stabilized variety to market.
Our methodology is designed for seamless integration into the existing $33 billion vertical farming market. Because our innovation is delivered in the form of a seed, there is no "adoption risk" for the farmer -- they do not need to buy new machinery or change their facility layout.
We focus initially on leafy greens and herbs (lettuce, kale, basil) due to their high sensitivity to lighting costs and short growth cycles, which allow for rapid validation of our traits. Our business model ensures that seeds are priced based on a fraction of the energy savings they provide, creating an immediate net gain for the grower and a sustainable revenue stream for continued R&D.
The success of the Terra Nova methodology is measured through three primary KPIs:
Energy Efficiency: Reduction in kilowatt-hours (kWh) of lighting energy required per kilogram of produce.
Nutrient Use Efficiency: Improvement in the ratio of nutrients absorbed versus nutrients supplied in hydroponic runoff.
Yield Increase: Higher biomass production relative to conventional outdoor-bred varieties under identical indoor conditions.
By aligning biology with technology, Terra Nova Seeds provides a scalable methodology to make urban food systems truly sustainable, resilient, and economically accessible.
This project has achieved several key outcomes at the ideation and planning stage.
• Problem Identification: We identified global food insecurity as a critical challenge driven by population growth, climate change, and pressure on traditional agriculture. We studied vertical farming and controlled-environment agriculture as potential solutions due to their ability to produce food locally and reliably. Through this analysis, we discovered that the primary impediment to the scalability and economic viability of vertical farming is high energy consumption, particularly from artificial lighting. We also examined how existing players in this space are addressing the problem, finding that most current solutions focus on improving lighting systems, infrastructure, or energy efficiency rather than the crops themselves.
• Solution Concept Development: We developed a novel solution that approaches the energy problem from a biological perspective. Instead of developing more efficient lighting technologies, we propose developing plants that are inherently adapted to indoor environments. By selectively breeding crops that grow efficiently under low-light and low-nutrient conditions, we aim to reduce the energy demands of indoor agriculture at the biological level.
• Proof of Concept Planning: We formulated a detailed proof-of-concept plan to demonstrate this approach using lettuce as a model crop. The planned experiment will evaluate 10 lettuce cultivars grown in hydroponic systems under four controlled conditions: standard indoor conditions, light-deprived conditions, nutrient-deprived conditions, and combined light- and nutrient-deprived conditions. This design will allow us to identify cultivars that perform best under indoor constraints and to select candidates for selective crossbreeding.
• Selective Breeding Strategy: Based on the planned results, we designed a selective crossbreeding strategy to combine desirable traits such as low-light tolerance, efficient nutrient uptake, and strong growth performance. Two generations of cross-bred plants will be raised and compared against original cultivars to evaluate improvement.
• Impact Pathway Definition: We defined a clear pathway from the initial idea and proposed solution to validation through a proof of concept. Following successful proof-of-concept results, we plan to raise capital to establish a company and scale our approach. This will include developing improved indoor-optimized lettuce varieties and expanding the breeding program to create optimized cultivars for additional crops, increasing the potential impact on global food security and sustainable agriculture.
