Our tale today will take us to the avant-garde of biology, and methane is at the heart of it. Ah. methane, scourge of climate lovers, the “dry gas” disdained by ethane and propane lovers, citizen of the Land of Misfit Molecules, yet it is the Food of Life, or rather perhaps the food that gave rise to life, when the archaea first appeared some 3.5 billion years ago.
Hot springs and mud volcanoes host these friends, these extremophiles, these methane-eaters. But they are found everywhere — soil, water, land. They like lots of methane, not too much oxygen, little bit of heat, little bit of copper. Sounds like the volcanic era right after the cooling of the earth, right?
Now, to the present day. Climatologists warn about fugitive methane, environmentalists decry the over-use of nitrogen fertilizers. Our methanotroph friends may be able to render good service, once again — two problems, solved in one.
So, let us introduce Windfall Bio, just now emerging from many moons of stealth. News has arrived from Windfall’s Menlo Park Hq that the company has closed a $9 million seed round led by Mayfield and UNTITLED—a venture fund founded by Magnus Rausing of the TetraLaval Family—with participation from additional investors including B37 Ventures, Baruch Future Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Cavallo Ventures. Always like a company with a name like UNTITLED to invest in a stealth technology. You can imagine venture capitalists flying to and from portfolio company offices in planes with blacked out windows, taking different routes with every flight, with voice scramblers on their iPhones, dressed in deep-sea diving suits and using a sensory deprivation tank as their pitch room.
What they do
The newly emerged company is developing the first-ever solution for capturing and transforming climate-harming methane emissions into living organic fertilizer. Windfall Bio is addressing dilute methane emissions, one of the largest and most under-appreciated problems for global warming. Windfall Bio will use the capital to begin pilot deployments on farms while also accelerating R&D activities.
How they do it
Windfall Bio’s solution “uses proprietary nature-based technology that enriches natural methane-eating microbes from the soil”.
OK, let’s try that in post-stealth English, they use methanotrophs that fix atmospheric nitrogen and make amino acid fertilizers.
About amino acid fertilizers
As Growers Secret observes, “Amino acids are the most efficient form of nitrogen fertilizer to use on plants. High-quality, organic, amino acid fertilizers are relatively new to the market and generally 12-15 percent nitrogen (compared to 45 percent for urea). They are water soluble and able to act as chelators for ions, have a pleasant odor and practically no salt, and will never cause burns when applied at labeled use rates.”
They add, “amino acids are available to the plant immediately on application, so there’s no need for the bacterial processes prior to absorption, far fewer losses through leaching and volatilization, and no production of toxic ammonia. When fertilized with amino acids, plants no longer need to build large molecules from small ones and can save significant amounts of energy that would have been used for nutrient uptake and amino acid synthesis”
What does Windfall do, exactly, with growers?
Windfall provides it proprietary microbes which are applied on a methane source, such as a compost heap where out methanogen friends are busy at work. Rather than capturing low-value methane for low-value power and heat markets, Windfall introduces the methanotrophs, who consume the methane and produce fertilizer. Avoiding methane production and giving a valuable product in return.
Why Windfall?
A methanotroph does not blow apples of the tree, so why Windfall as a brand name? Perhaps, the idea that using the methane being produced all around us as a source of (otherwise) costly fertilizer is a sudden benefit tot he grower, a windfall.
Of windfalls and nitrogen
The pursuit of effective nitrogen fertilizers has been a part of our story for 10,000 years. That Neolithic farming revolution? Er, it was powered by rising yields and those came from manure fertilizer, might have been accidental at first, but we see the amino acid fertilizer signature at the dawn of agriculture.
Today, we use ammonia not because it works better, but because it is cheaper to obtain and can be produced in vast quantities. It’s the old petroleum & gas story, again.
The term windfall originates in a gift by Roger de Mowbray to his tenant Ralph de Kirketon — the management and use of Hovingham Forest in the north Yorkshire dales including any bounty of bark, branch or fruit caused by windstorm — the windfall. Mowbray wasn’t famously generous with holdings of real value, there wasn’t much in Hovingham Forest, partly on account of nitrogen deficiency.
I’ve walked the lands of Yorkshire, and sure enough, there are a lot of signs of soil distress. The ryegrass and the fescues of the hill country are more yellow than you’d expect — when William Blake wrote his anthemic “And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon Englands mountains green,” he was writing from a view afforded by a West Sussex pub, not the hills of northeast Yorkshire. Those moors you remember from the pages of Withering Heights, they have sandstone below them, and are replete in acid, which decreases the availability of plant nutrients, and the region is known not for row crops but for sheep grazing on the grasses, and the pockets of oak and beech are the high sign for acid soils.
Solution? Well, one good one is that dweller of the bottom of the food chain of life, the methanotrophs who can fix nitrogen. Good for the soil, and can be good business.
If only.
Did I mention that there’s a catch. Our methanotrophic friends don’t need synthetic biology re-engineering on the grand-scale, but they do need to work in colonies. Unfortunately, most of the organisms, like you and I, choke rather quickly on our own waste. We are all symbionts — humans, if you think about it, are hotels for gut bacteria who do all of the work for us, energy-wise. Sort of the same for methanotrophs. Used alone, single strains, they chose on the waste and pack it in. Used symbiotically with other microorganisms that use that waste, that allows the methanotrophs to thrive.
Enter Windfall Bio. Essentially, curators of high-performance Methanotrophic teams. The Methanotroph Yankess, the Methanotroph Lakers, the Methanotrophic Patriots, you get the idea. It’s a relatively new concept in soil and microbial management, the understanding and tuning of colonies — the art of achieving this is rare art, and Josh Silverman’s been hard at work in his post-Calysta days to build just that.
The support from worthies such as Breakthrough Energy, Baruch Future Ventures and the like suggests that they have the science proved or quite nearly so, and now it is a matter of brand, business model, adoption and scale. Not a matter of engineering microbes as much as the selection and matching of colonies of bacteria, that the one supports the other. B-Harmony, if you will.
So, dislikers of nitrogen fertilizers, help is apparently on the way. Ourselves, we like the scavenging of methane even better, every molecule used is a molecule not vented. Someday perhaps we’ll see this technology deployed amongst the methane clathrates as they begin to warm, to prevent a runaway greenhouse effect when scads of methane is liberated from frozen soil by rising temperatures.
That’s a ways ahead. For now, the windfall is to the grower, windfall indeed.
Reaction from the stakeholders
“We are empowering farmers of all sizes to be a part of the methane solution, improving efficiency and reducing costs while also helping them reduce their reliance on synthetic fertilizers. Windfall’s technology represents a unique win-win-win for farmers, consumers, and climate.”
“Our methane-to-fertilizer solution is a paradigm shift for climate technologies,” said Josh Silverman, CEO and co-founder of Windfall Bio. “We are empowering farmers of all sizes to be a part of the methane solution, improving efficiency and reducing costs while also helping them reduce their reliance on synthetic fertilizers. Windfall’s technology represents a unique win-win-win for farmers, consumers, and climate.”