Founded in 2019, Rare Earth Global began as a consultancy project which explored the potential of industrial hemp as a revenue source for producers in the Caribbean. The project quickly identified several beneficial properties of the plant, such as its rapid growth, climate versatility, and low input requirement, which mark it out as a potential replacement for other common crop species. The company now seeks to link up customers and processors, for a fee, increasing accessibility to hemp products.
“One of the things that came out of that project was that South American growers we were in touch with were telling us all about the deforestation linked to soy being grown there for animal feed and saying look, with the hemp we’re growing, we should be doing that [growing hemp for animal feed] instead,” explained Suneet Shivaprasad, Rare Earth Global COO, as reported by AgFunder News.
Following a successful initial feasibility study which suggested that hemp could indeed replace soy in aquafeeds, the startup teamed up with Mowi, a leading salmon producer, to further test the potential of hemp.
“We got some match funding from Mowi, the world’s largest producer of farm-raised Atlantic salmon and we ran studies for two years, which showed we have as good a product as soy, if not better, as far as performance is concerned. Then we did a full lifecycle study that shows a significant carbon footprint reduction [vs soy] from using hemp,” said Shivaprasad.
Whilst the founders of Rare Earth are all too aware of the investor-mania and subsequent price-crash which surrounded the CBD product industry over recent years, they seem confident that this will not be repeated with their business model, which finds a use for every part of the plant.
“[The CBD market] was a market that grew too quickly and didn’t really have an end customer. For us, the first task was servicing industrial demand, and then scaling smaller higher value projects. So within feed, for example, there are some high value pet food customers who will pay a little bit more and help us bridge the gap from being too expensive right now to getting a standardised crop yield where it’s affordable,” Shivaprasad explained.
Whilst the company is still in its early days, only just beginning to think about scaling, the potential impacts for industries such as aquaculture are already evident.
“On fish feed, we’ve done a test with a customer and got a letter of intent for over 50,000 tons a year and have several other customers interested, so we know the demand is there,” Shivaprasad concluded.
Rare Earth Global – a UK-based startup seeking to bring hemp products, including aquafeeds, to the industrial market – has completed a £1 million pre-seed funding round. Read More
