Meat Naturally Africa

Climate change is accelerating African ecosystems and the people that depend on them towards a tipping point of utter disaster.  An estimated 90% of Africa’s rangelands are degraded and the rate of further degradation of natural resources is occurring at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth-- threatening biodiversity and adversely affecting the lives of 20 million pastoralists on the continent.   Meanwhile, those that are improving economically in Africa, mostly living in urban areas, are driving a demand that is expanding the number of cattle on the continent at an increasing rate offsetting decreasing trends in the Americas and Europe.   Our remote-sensing traceability system and mobile slaughterhouses can transform the path of red meat consumption and production in the fastest growing continent on the planet--benefiting its population and that of the world through reduction in greenhouse gases that exacerbate climate change.

Globally, the Africa contains 25% of all global rangelands, and this habitat is widely regarded as one of the most important to protect for enabling nature’s contribution to stabilising climate. Restoring and maintaining Africa’s natural rangelands may have a carbon sequestration potential that may equal that of Amazon forests.  Due to their evolutionary development under extensive fire and grazing pressures, Africa's rangelands are able to be restored more rapidly than these other habitats. Additionally, they are able to be restored through a productive use in a livelihood strategy that is critical for Africa’s poor. Over 70% of Africa's livestock herds are raised on communal lands, but less than 5% contributes to formal food supply chains of the burgeoning urban population.  Simultaneously, policies and consumption patterns are pushing Africa towards industrialised meat production that is bad for the local and global environment.  Overcoming the tragedy of the commons and unequal markets by incentivising regenerative grazing practices and providing mobile market solutions is essential to reduce significant greenhouse gas emissions and enable small scale producers to provide protein solutions for Africa.  

We are proposing to scale a combination of two solutions we have successfully used to restore Africa's rangelands. First, we aim to improve our mobile slaughterhouse, which requires refining to meet the water, waste, and energy needs of facilitating transport of carcasses instead of live animals to market.  In some areas, live animals are not allowed to be moved due to the risk of disease from co-existence of livestock-farming communities with wildlife and strict protocols for trade from these areas can only be achieved with a mobile solution.     Secondly, we want to improve our remote sensing-based database  on Google Earth Engine to track before and after agreement trends across four categories of degradation (bare ground, bush encroachment, spread of invasive alien plants, fire) and percentage of village grazing area providing healthy grassland signal.  The combination of both innovations is critical to link trends in environmental condition to the opportunity we provide to sell through Meat Naturally. Additionally, we want to enable the database to translate the remote sensing signal through machine learning to interpret results into carbon sequestration impacts to unlock carbon finance that further incentivizes land management and provide easy to use data for policy and consumer campaigns.

Growing from an NGO project to a social enterprise in Southern Africa, we have worked with poor rural communal livestock farmers for over a decade.  I have conducted feasibility assessments for implementation in South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, and Kenya that has helped our team understand both the similarities and the differences in pastoralist approaches and challenges from which our business model is based.  While we currently service 2000 farmers, there are 30 million pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, and our efforts are targeting the 9 million that are recognised as most vulnerable due to their proximity to wildlife impacts and distance to market.  The database we are proposing will help farmers and government support programmes with annual reviews of the impact of their grazing practices to reinforce incentives for good practice.  Importantly, the system can also become an MRV for voluntary carbon standards for improved grazing practices that will unlock climate finance and sustainable meat value-chain opportunities that demand an evidence base showing environmental improvement that these small scale producers would otherwise be excluded from. 

Meat Naturally aims to develop innovations for private-sector based replication and promotion of regenerative grazing  across 100 million ha of rangeland (total restoration potential in Africa is 700 million ha).  Once developed,  the monitoring and mobile market system will unlock finance not only for Meat Naturally, but for millions of communal farmers and other SMEs that can then promote and tap into “eating meat as a treat” . Lower consumption of tightly managed free-ranging animals in natural grasslands can help maintain climate-resilient ecosystem, African natural and cultural heritage associated with livestock production, and reducing emissions from current trajectory.     

Development funding has been channeled to a plethora of livestock projects in rural Africa that fail to recognize the fact that livestock provide important cultural as well as commercial opportunities and that the success depends on collective management of the resource they all depend on, their rangeland.  Alan Savoury and others have shown the potential for regenerative grazing in Africa as a result of its evolution under huge pressure by wild herbivores that followed climatic-driven routines that enable a rapid ecosystem regeneration, but uptake has primarily been on privately managed rangelands.  Our innovation is to use a conservation agreement tool (see video) as our supplier contract, and to deploy technology to mobilize market access for engaged communities.  By focusing on improvements in the natural fodder base (as opposed to the genetics of the animal or animal husbandry) we are reducing the enteric fermentation emissions of these animals through improved nutrition and health, and value chain emissions by short-cutting transportation routes while also making more natural meat available to growing urban markets.  The innovation of mobile slaughterhouse use in Africa (they have been used in niche market farms in US and Europe) enables us to travel to communities when they are ready to sell and to service communities that would normally be banned from trade because they are located in a no-live animal trade zone.   

The core technologies that will power our solution are digital and  engineering in nature. First, we seek to develop a new Rangeland Explorer web-based platform for Africa's Rangeland (based on the Forest Watch example--see www.globalforestwatch.org)  that integrates satellite imagergy from various sources to provide analysis of trends on target rangelands.  The idea is to expand the current Google Earth Tool we use into a more open access platform that can support government, NGOs, and private sector groups to work with communities to improve land and livestock management.  The idea is that the platform can also serve as a means of traceability for livestock products coming from the communities who have successfully restored their land and reduced livestock-based emissions thereby expanding market opportunities. 

Secondly, we need new engineering solutions to create a durable, solar-powered, self-contained version of a mobile abattoir (slaughterhouse) that can reduce energy and waste concerns from previous prototypes.  

If we are successful in this award application, our intent is to expand on our current monitoring system and to make it accessible online for others to use for their own impact monitoring of village grazing area restoration and sustainable use plans.  Land changes by new grazing plans, translate into EVI changes that can be picked up for a target polygon across key degradation indicators, shown in the screenshot. 

Our current mobile abattoir unit has successfully served communities adjacent to Kruger National Park, but it is clunky and is challenging for energy and waste management.  We have visited the US and believe the Friesla products are excellent and can be adapted for African conditions with engineering solutions for water and solar power.

https://friesla.com/

Goal:  Restore Africa's High Biodiversity Rangelands

Target: Improve land and livestock management on 1 million hectares of high biodiversity rangeland

Outcomes:

*Small scale livestock farmers and pastoralists on communal rangelands are collectively managing their livestock in a way that restores rangeland ecosystems and protects wildlife

*Governments have adopted transformative commodity-based trade regulations that enable new market access standards for communities living adjacent to wildlife management areas (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272101225_Would_a_Commodity-based_Trade_Approach_Improve_Market_Access_for_Africa_A_Case_Study_of_the_Potential_of_Beef_Exports_from_Communal_Areas_of_Namibia)

*Monitoring systems and value chains are providing incentives for continual improvement of land and livestock management in African rangelands

*Consumers are aware and able to preferentially select livestock product choices produced in regenerative grazing systems

Outputs:

*By 2025, Meat Naturally and its partners have engaged 15,000 farmers in conservation agreements for improved management of 1 million ha of high biodiversity rangelands

*By 2025, Meat Naturally is a showcase model for regulators and policy makers on potential implementation standards for mobile abattoirs and commodity-based trade from communal lands

*By 2023, Meat Naturally’s Rangeland Explorer web-based platform has upgraded functionality and accessibility to monitor degradation trends and provide new integrated traceability of land and livestock improvement from small scale farmers

*By 2023, Meat Naturally has co-developed a consumer outreach campaign that promotes non-industrial, low carbon meat consumption that enable Africa to meet its nutritional needs.

Activities:

*Work with clients and partners to expand the conservation agreement footprint across prioritized rangelands in Southern and Eastern Africa

*Develop a mobile abattoir business operations and promote lessons, and challenges to national ministries via the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainability in Africa and Herding for Health Initiatives

*Upgrade the MN Rangeland Explorer functionality

*Participate in the Slow Food efforts and consumer outreach campaigns.

https://securingwaterforfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/SWFF_MeatNaturally_PerformanceEvaluationReport_1-30-2020.pdf

Currently the enterprise services >2300 communal farmers (or about 10,000 people with an average household size of 5 people) in catchment areas in South Africa that are benefiting million downstream users (eg https://www.wwf.org.za/our_news/our_blog/cash_cows_in_a_time_of_corona.cfm) and communities near Kruger National Park (https://www.thegef.org/news/my-cattle-your-rhinos-south-africas-poverty-and-wildlife-conundrum).

Despite plans to start in Botswana to service 3,000 farmers in the Okavango Delta area (as part of a larger Green Climate Fund proposal that will grow beneficiaries to 96,000 over the next 8.5 years), Covid 19 travel bans mean that are next year's projected growth will remain in South Africa and likely grow minimally to a potential 2,800 -3000 farming households (about 15,000 people). 

Within five years, with existing client projects, it is likely we can reach 15,000 farmers directly, and if we are able to receive the award and prove the model, we hope replication will be able to reach 1,000,000 of the 9 million living withing prioritised Transfrontier Conservation Areas. (https://www.peaceparks.org/h4h/)

Our primary goal in the next five years is to develop a viable business model and set of tools and technologies that can be adopted and replicated by hundreds of NGO, social enterprises, private sector to enable Africa's 50 million communal livestock farmers to regenerate natural rangeland ecoystems and their functions.  We want to start with key monitoring and value chain technology development and then deploy these to expand income incentive opportunities via consolidation into carbon finance projects with our key partners Conservation International and the Peace Parks Foundation.

With their support and grant finance, our approach is to train other enterprise operators within the red-meat value chain and government regulators in sub-Saharan Africa on the business model and its tools. 

Although the enterprise has been successful in its development, conservation, and financial goals to be operationally profitable, we do not have the financial resources to re-engineer the web-based monitoring platform or the mobile slaughterhouse.  We have worked with some technical experts, but believe additional technical support could lead to even greater pioneering outcomes that maximise efficiency, accessibility, and user-friendliness. The biggest barrier is the perception by many funders that all cattle are bad for the environment which is simply not the case in Africa.  https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-environment-but-cows-are-not-killing-the-climate-94968#:~:text=It%20stated%20that%20livestock%20produced,all%20modes%20of%20transportation%20combined.

Financially, Meat Naturally is applying for flexible funding that come with technical assistance that can help bring in new partnership arrangements that augment the value of the monitoring and mobile abattoir system.  

Additionally, we are embarking on an initiative called "Eat Naturally" with Slow Food Africa to help educate consumers, policy makers, and funders about the environmental, social, and cultural benefits sustainable livestock farming can bring to small scale farmers in Africa.

In November 2017, Conservation International and Peace Parks Foundation signed an MOU to collaborate on a regional Herding for Health programme, in which Meat Naturally was envisaged as a critical player for project sustainability.  At the time, Sarah Frazee, the CEO of Meat Naturally, was the director of Conservation South Africa and as such she played a critical role in the development of both the Herding for Health Programme and Meat Naturally.  In April 2019, Sarah left Conservation South Africa to lead Meat Naturally full-time. 

The Director is working full time on the solution with three key experts who are doing work on the solution as contracted by Meat Naturally.  Meat Naturally also has two other full time staff who are dedicated to the current business operations (mobile auctions and livestock production support) who also contribute to discussions about practicality and ease of implementation for the new tools.

Sarah Frazee has a degree in economics and 25 years of experience in
sustainable development. As the CEO of Conservation South Africa from
2000-2019, she developed business savvy which she has used to create Meat
Naturally as a spin off of the NGO in 2016. She also developed a $90 million
project to the Green Climate Fund on regenerative livestock management in Botswana in 2019 and has a network that enables her to access Agriculture Ministers of 12 countries via the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainability in Africa (see www.gaboronedeclaration.org)  She is working with two experts in remote sensing and machine learning technologies here in South Africa at ZSV consulting.  Other team members, Gerbrand Nel, having grown up on a commercial beef farm is experienced in  livestock management and handling systems.  Nomusa Jaca has an MSc in Animal Science and is experienced in Commodity-based Trade and mobile abattoir operations in communities in Kruger buffer.  Meat Naturally also works extensively with a range of NGOs and movements like Slow Food Africa that provide critical support and access to stakeholders that can make the replication of our model viable.

We are the market access partner for the Herding for Health Partnership of Conservation International and Peace Parks Foundation.  We also service projects of IUCN, WWF, and Conservation South Africa and work with these partners to tailor make incentive packages and grazing plans to optimise return on investment for local communities and conservation.

Meat Naturally business model provides livestock production and mobile market access solutions to unlock red meat value chains for communities and conservation in Africa

We offer convenience, usability, and sustainability for responsible production and consumption from communal rangelands. 

Specifically, for our customer segments, we offer the following value that responds to their needs: NGOs and Govt Clients Seeking Project Design Support: MN brings unique design and feasibility for conservation agreements rewarded by mobile markets beyond donor funding; Livestock/Meat/Wool Buyers: MN supply/services reduce risk and cost of purchasing and sourcing from communal farmers, adding supply and empowerment to their value chains Farmers: MN provides flexible, fair, and consistent market access while also enhancing livelihood resilience

MIT Solve's range of expertise (engineering, IT, remote sensing, and financing of sustainable solutions) is exactly what Meat Naturally is looking for to support our development and scaling efforts.  

Specifically, we would love technical collaboration on the upgrading of our current web-based monitoring platform into a system that has greater access and functionality for other social enterprises, NGOs, businesses and regulators that may want an evidence-solution for monitoring degradation trends and linking them to livestock product traceability systems.

We also would love support on  the design of a self-contained mobile abattoir unit with improved efficiency with regards to energy, water consumption, and waste management for its operations in the conditions of the remote communities we serve. Biochemical solutions to our waste would also be pioneering for a continent with tremendous water scarcity.

Finally, we would love access to MIT network of financial partners who may be interested in providing R&D grants for the construction of two new prototypes for deployment in two of Africa's premier wildlife destinations--Botswana's Okavango Delta and the Kruger National Park.  Both have sufficient demand for >1 million visitors (under normal times) and currently import their meat from >700 km away.  As such, the units will contribute to viable business plans for expansion of our operations in these areas.

Meat Naturally has had successful partnerships with the UCLA Business School and the University of Johannesburg PEETS Institute that have contributed to the robust development of our business.  As such, we enjoy working with academic institutions to expand our thinking with the latest research that we are often unaware of.  Having won awards in the past, we also know how much can be learned from listening to other innovators and how they are overcoming issues tied to sustainability.  So, basically, our partnership goals are to get exposure to new ideas and co-develop plans with people sharing a common vision.  

It would be good to partner with Forest Watch to learn from their technical approach and operational model for the monitoring system.   We also have connections with Trends Earth and would like to bring them into the collaboration.  

For the mobile abattoir, we would like to work with Friesla to benefit from their experience.  However we would love to work with MIT faculty and/or students on this initiative.