Pioneering plants at Nutreco’s Garden of the Future

Bernd holds a PhD in plant breeding and biotechnology. Before he joined Nutreco, he built his own medicinal plant cultivation and breeding company, together with Dr. Karin Berger, our current Phytotechnology Discovery Director. Now, Bernd brings his incredible knowledge and experience to Nutreco.

A plant breeder’s paradise

The team at our Garden of the Future does all the development work for Nutreco’s Phyto-complex products. This starts with finding an individual plant of a particular species that, in many cases, has never been cultivated before, and figuring out how to true-to-type mass-propagate it: going from one single plant to the millions of plants required for full-scale production.

When working with plant species that have not been used commercially before, the team needs to build cultivation knowledge from scratch. These plants species have also never been subjected to genetic improvement or plant breeding activities. “This intraspecific specie variability, or beta-complexity, is a huge hidden treasure. It fascinates me every time we get to explore the vast amount of variability within a plant species – it’s a plant breeder’s paradise!”

In order to exploit this variability, Bernd’s group sources plant accessions – individual plants from the same, single species but collected from different locations – from all over the world. They bring these accessions to the experimental fields at Nutreco’s Garden of the Future or our other growing locations around the world for screening and evaluation, so that we can identify and select the most favourable ones.

The team has introduced advanced technology to help them do this more effectively. “We have developed our own AI assisted algorithm to integrate all of the data we collect, from the fields all the way to the animals’ response – and it is amazing,” said Bernd. “This algorithm is a revolutionary tool for me as a plant breeder. For the first time, we can measure the response that an individual plant, containing hundreds of specialised metabolites, triggers in a target animal. For my work, it means that we can compare the response to individual plants, rank them and select the best.”

The double-edged sword of variability

Bernd also warn that the same genetic variability within a plant species that gives us so many options for our Phyto-complexes can also be a doubled-edged sword. “It can be our biggest ally and our biggest enemy. It is our ally when we search for plants with a better effect in the animals. But once we have this ‘better’ plant in hand – the ‘mother’ plant – it becomes our enemy, because we want to maintain the selected plant as it is.”

The answer to this challenge is true-to-type propagation (in vivo or in vitro); in other words, propagation that conserves the unique genetic set up of the selected plants. Developing these types of propagation technologies is one of the main tasks undertaken by Bernd’s Plant Domestication team.

Another benefit of true-to-type propagation, if it included in the selection and propagation activities from the beginning, is that it enables us to generate plant materials suitable for variety protection by the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO). When the variety is approved and variety rights are given to Nutreco, Nutreco owns it and benefits from 25 years of protection.

Finding the right partners

Once the propagation methods are developed and we reach the final step of full-scale production, the team at Nutreco’s Garden of the Future engages with nurseries and growers from a network they have built over years, especially in Switzerland’s Phyto Valley. These growers have been hand-selected and trained as specialists in plant propagation and cultivation – they are familiar with the particularities of plants grown for their specialised metabolites. “We do not often engage with new, unexperienced parties; if we do, we thoroughly check the conditions and current operations beforehand – for example, drawing and analysing soil samples to check for potential contaminants, such as pesticide residues, dioxins and heavy metals. We also look at the hygiene conditions and infrastructure to see if they are adequate for our purposes,” said Bernd.  

To diversify production and minimise supply risks, the team engages with growers in different geographical zones. “It may surprise you, but we often find that the area where a plant species naturally occurs is not necessarily the best area for its cultivation. We have established experimental field stations on different continents, to run our field experiments and pilot cultivation trials and find the best cultivation sites,” said Bernd.

Most of the plants the team works on have never been used before in the feed industry, and, for Bernd, this one of the most fascinating – and challenging – parts of the job. “Even after many years in the business, this pioneering aspect absolutely fascinates me,” he said. Producing plants for our Phyto-complexes requires us to consider a range of special conditions – for example, in which developmental stage we should harvest the plants or how to dry them – that are often quite different from those used when growing agricultural crops like maize or wheat. “Even minor changes in cultivation and processing can have a major impact on the specific set of specialised metabolites, and thus on the response the plant triggers in the animal.”  

In agricultural production, growers are usually focused on achieving the maximum yield of harvested biomass per hectare. “For our crops it is different,” said Bernd. “Our goal is to obtain a maximum yield of specialised metabolites per hectare.” For this reason, and to ensure genetically identical plants can be reproduced, the team compiles detailed cultivation guidelines for each species and provides them to growers. “Strict adherence to these guidelines is a pre-condition for successful production.”

Looking to the future

The Discovery, Phytochemistry, Plant domestication and Plant Cultivation teams at Nutreco’s Garden of the Future work together to achieve a full pipeline of new products to solve our customers’ animal challenges. “The speed and progress we’ve made so far motivate me as an individual, us as team, and Nutreco Exploration as a group,” said Bernd. “I am confident that within the coming years, Nutreco’s Garden of the Future will become internationally known as a competence centre for the use of plants that contain specialised metabolites. Although I’ve been working in this industry for decades, I’m still amazed by the potential of plants.”