Niche Crops And The Food System Of The Future

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Niche crops have to compete for sales, resources, and exposure in the marketplace, but when it comes to building the food system of the future, they might actually have an advantage. Kathryn Cook, co-founder and CEO of the crop genetics company NuCicer, says they’ve seen more flexibility in the supply chain when working with a specialty crop like chickpeas.

Cook… “So now you're starting to try to get fit into slightly smaller processing facilities where they have slightly smaller silos, still very large, and it gives a little bit more flexibility in segregating these different varieties. Because obviously if you have 35 percent protein, you don't want that just to get mixed in with the commodity chickpea at 20 or 22 percent protein content. It just dilutes the value, no one knows what to do with it. But if you're dealing with these, you know, again, one size smaller silos and slightly smaller processing infrastructure almost gives you a stepping stone by which to create some market destruction by actually creating value for these processing companies in their facilities that are already used to processing more of a specialty crop. And then as that value takes off, now they can start to scale it up. And so I see this actually as a benefit of us working in chickpea because the supply chain is flexible.”

Learn more at nucicer.com.