NativaLand – a main contributor and driver for Europe’s sweet potato production

Patrick Fitzgerald, an internationally recognised innovator in the plant industry talks to John Paul Prior, Irish-Portugal Business Network Porto Chair and Director of Sales Strategy & Tech Dev., Farmony about a partnership growing sustainable sweet potato varieties near Lisbon at the 6th IPBN Sustainability Conference held this week.

Text and Photo: Chris Graeme

Patrick Fitzgerald is internationally recognised as an innovator in the sustainable plant industry by creating, testing and improving new sweet potato genetic lines for different market segments through his family company Beotanics.

On a field at Muge, just over 60 Km Northeast of Lisbon in one of Portugal’s main agricultural regions, is NativaLand, a project he forged in a partnership in 2016 with a local investment company, which is supplying a diverse range of high-quality sweet potato plants to growers located all over Europe and further afield.

Pat says he loves the sweet potato because of its great nutritional benefits and believes that total sweet potato consumption will increase in the coming years despite a current depression in the plant-based food market.

From early on in his career Pat has served as chairman of Ireland’s Nursery Association, and as a member of the European Nursery Association Committee.

At the 6th Irish-Portugal Business Network Sustainability Conference on Tuesday the CEO & Founder of Beotanics and Board Member at the Irish Food Board  Bord BIA explained how his farming company has developed and produced new plant varieties for international markets – many of them in Europe – while working with other variety creators in maximising the genetics of crops like red sweet potato and wasabi.

Unique plant-based solutions

Beotanics has successfully partnered with the food and beverage industries to provide unique plant-based solutions that are high in nutritional and functional value. Based in Country Kilkenny, Ireland, the group employs around 45 people and works hand-in-glove with universities, plant-based R&D organisations and industry partners worldwide, serving and supporting a global shift towards plant-based nutrition.

“Farming today is often all about being part of the supply chain for the big supermarket stores where we all shop. We pick up a plastic bag of salad or veg, put it in our trolley and that’s most people’s notion of farming for the week and that’s how we get our food”, he said on a panel entitled ‘The Vertical Farming Revolution & Farming Sustainability’.

Pat stresses that he’s not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but points out that behind every one of those plastic packages you pick up in the supermarket, is waste. Some of the vegetables (because they don’t look perfect) never make it to the packages, even though there’s nothing really wrong with them. They end up as animal feed, go to landfill, while others go into biodigesters.

Plant-based protein foods

The focus at Beotanics, which he runs with his son Richard who is a biotechnologist, was born out of a recognition that the company would only be fully sustainable if it followed a working model to transform some of their crops into food ingredients for the food and beverages industry.

This meant developing new plant-based protein foods made from plants, fungi, and by-products through an EU-led Horizon 2020 project called Smart Protein.

A primary aim of the project is to help build a future-proof protein supply by creating sustainable and nutritious alternative proteins. This is in direct response to some of the most urgent challenges faced by the planet, including climate change and global food security.

It is expected that the first wave of products – including plant-based meats, fish, seafood, cheese, infant formula, and other dairy products, as well as baked goods – will go to market in or around 2025.

So, in 2016 Beotanics set up a joint venture sweet potato operation with Portuguese investments company Orientempo to form NativaLand, which is based in Portugal 65 km Northeast of Lisbon.

It was created with the purpose of supporting farmers all over Europe and other regions in increasing the productivity, quality and diversity of their sweet potato crops.

This allows farmers access to some of the best licensed sweet potato varieties in the world and by maintaining a clean stock programme dedicated to sweet potato production support.

It is an intensive sweet potato plant production operation that is involved in all the steps of sweet potato plant development from R&D, breeding, testing, selecting, virus cleaning, and quarantine of mother plants, to the overall process of propagating the plants.

“Now we have a collaboration here in Portugal growing purple sweet potato and turning it into a concentrated puré, and we have three multinational clients on board”, said Pat.

This puré can be made out of oversized, undersized, wonky or blemished sweet potato and wasabi vegetables – the latter a member of the brassica family, grown primarily for it’s enlarged underground stem, sometimes referred to as a rhyzome.

Demand for Wasabi now outstrips supply and many “wasabi” products include faux wasabi paste made from horseradish.

“In the long term, as we build scale we are now starting to work with a crop called Yacon – a tuberous crop native to the Andean region which is known for its crunchy, crisp texture and sweet taste, similar to that of a pear or melon – and our product development has now established that for a small business in a small rural area that should be our direction”, he said.

Better for your health

Pat says that although plant-based nutrition seems a recent phenomena it does in fact have an ancient heredity input.

According to Harvard Health Publishing, plant-based or plant-forward eating patterns focus on foods primarily from plants. This includes not only fruits and vegetables, but also nuts, seeds, oils, whole grains, legumes, and beans. It doesn’t mean that you are vegetarian or vegan and never eat meat or dairy. Rather, you are proportionately choosing more of your foods from plant sources.

Plant-based diets have been has been shown in both large population studies and randomised clinical trials to reduce risk of heart disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, certain cancers (specifically colon, breast, and prostate cancer), depression, and in older adults, a decreased risk of frailty, along with better mental and physical function.

Helping to solve food security issues

And in terms of the current geopolitical context and US protectionism, plants like the sweet potato and wasabi could be part of improving European food security; a problem that countries like Mexico and Canada are having because of a sweep of a pen in the Oval Office in Washington.

But the problem of food security was evident before Donald Trump was elected president of the US in November last year.

“This was happening anyway. If you look at sweet potato – which has become a bit of an obsession for us although we are involved in other crops – this has happened over the past three to five years. Covid, freak frosts, and containers being knocked over have all changed the landscape for small producers”, explains Pat.

“We introduced the sweet potato into the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Norway from a farmer perspective back in 2011, but it was only from 2016 when scale took off that we had to figure out how we were going to fulfill the supply chain”, he said, adding that their sweet potato business is based on sound genetic research from Louisiana State University.

“We brought the strains to Europe and tested them across every region. Before, in 2010/11, there was no sweet potato production in these countries; today there is substantial and scaling sweet potato production”.

An ambitious expansion plan

In 2019, Beotanics embarked on a significant €1 million expansion plan supported by Enterprise Ireland to meet demand as it has fast become a key Irish player on the international stage in discovering new ways to feed the planet, improve human health, balance resources, enhance biodiversity and reduce the environmental impact of crop production.

But the company started out with humble beginnings as an AgroTech spinoff from an innovative alternative farm enterprise set up in 1990 and today has become a European leader in the development of these niche food crops.

Around eight years ago as the idea of sustainability became a more widespread phenomenon, Pat realised that the sweet potato was filling the sustainability gap.

It got involved in projects in Egypt after Beotanics got a seasonal licensing arrangement in that country since Europe was not able to produce everything to meet demand. Now the company is looking at production in Morocco.

“We have to have a little bit of collaboration with countries outside Europe because we’ve had a lot of weather problems this year in Portugal” – one of the wettest winters in 20 years – he said.

A crisis in the plant-based food sector?

In Ireland the number of plant-based food producers has dropped in recent years but is there optimism in the sector for meeting this huge demand and does this include the sector embracing new technology?

Pat says it’s difficult because innovation takes time and upfront investment before any return, not to mention a current depression on the plant-based food sector.

Amid a cost-of-living crisis and inflation across the food sector as a whole, data shows that consumers are buying fewer plant-based foods.

And when it comes to crops it is always about the price and if sustainability is your obligation, then obligations cost money and so its hard to get farmers optimistic” given the current climate, he admits.

“You’re not going to get me to say there’s a lot of optimism about, but the reality of the situation is that farmers are eternal optimists but there is a need to downplay that optimism at the moment,” he concludes.

Photo: Patrick Fitzgerald, an internationally recognised innovator in the plant industry talks to John Paul Prior, Irish-Portugal Business Network Porto Chair and Director of Sales Strategy & Tech Dev., Farmony about a partnership growing sustainable sweet potato varieties near Lisbon.