What we do

Everyone knows plants fight climate change--but Elysia does it in a new way. By engineering animal feed crops to suppress methane emissions, we give worldwide reach to tech that cuts out more warming than shipping, air travel, and deforestation put together.

CH₄ not CO₂

Instead of using plants to take CO2 out of the atmosphere while they grow, we think about what most of our crops are grown for: feeding animals, who turn that feed into methane emissions when they digest it. Pound for pound, methane is over 20 times as powerful at warming the climate as CO2. If we can keep feed crops from releasing methane when digested by livestock, we can cut the greenhouse gas footprint of our most carbon-intensive foods in half.

A living solution for a living problem

There's a simple reason nobody has cracked the problem of livestock methane. Although animal ag is the world's largest source of methane, this source is spread across 40% of earth's land area, in over 4 billion domestic animals on 500 million individual farms. We believe that the only way to reach every corner of the world in time to make a difference is with a self-replicating, low-friction technology that any farmer can not only use, but produce wherever they are: the feed plants that animals already eat.

How we do it

1

Target Selection

We take well-known, naturally occurring methane-reducing compounds from plants and microbes, and design genetic systems for biosynthesis that we test in vitro. We also screen novel and proprietary methane candidates of our own.

2

Microcosm Testing

We create bioengineered plants at laboratory scale and feed them to methane-producing small animals in a proprietary discovery tool that mimics real-world farm use in a fraction of the time. We test different crop types with different methane-reducing systems to find the best combination of plant and compound to target a specific farming system.

3

Crop Deployment

Our most promising, in vivo-validated candidates are transferred to elite, farm-ready varieties of major feed crops. The bioengineered varieties are screened and fine-tuned for real world farm performance. After final testing for safety & efficacy, the methane-reducing crop varieties are offered to cattle as part of their feed in a typical farm setting.

4

Product Commercialization

We take our top candidates through government approvals, then bring them to farmers. We do that via the existing feed supply chain, using the readily available farms, trucks, and feed mills that already deliver food to our livestock in an extraordinarily efficient manner.

FAQ

What crops are you using?

We aim to launch varieties of five major feed crops, each one of which works best for a major livestock production system. We are currently working on corn grain, for use in large US-style dairies; ryegrass, for New Zealand-style grazing pastures; and sorghum, for forage/silage in warm regions like Brazil and India.

OK, but how does it actually work?

Different versions of our technology work in slightly different ways, because they use different mechanisms of reducing methane. In some cases we cause our plants to produce a compound that interferes with the microbes that generate methane in the animal gut; in other cases the plants make an enzyme that redirects carbon metabolism from methane into something more useful. Here's one example: we gave feed plants the genetic instructions to make a well-known methane reducing compound that's normally found in a rare seaweed. When we gave animals feed including about 5% engineered plants, we found that their methane emissions decreased by over 90% within just a few days.