What if a single bathroom break could help grow our next meal, reduce climate emissions, and clean up our waterways? Sanitation360, a Swedish startup launched in 2019, is turning this idea into reality with a circular sanitation system that transforms human urine into safe, climate-positive fertilizer. By capturing and recycling the nitrogen and phosphorus in urine, the initiative is tackling some of the most pressing challenges in modern agriculture—nutrient pollution, fertilizer dependence, and unsustainable wastewater treatment.
Globally, the production and use of synthetic fertilizers is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture. It also depends on finite resources and contributes to the degradation of ecosystems through nutrient runoff. Sanitation360 captures nutrients before they become pollutants and returns them to the soil in a usable, hygienic form. Historically, civilizations from ancient China to 19th-century Paris recycled urine for farming. Sanitation360 revives this practice using modern science and design.
At the heart of their innovation is the Kissamaja®, a unisex dry urinal designed for speed, hygiene, and inclusivity. Installed at major festivals, sports arenas, and public events across Sweden, these toilets collect urine at source, before it’s diluted or contaminated in wastewater systems. The urine is then stabilized, dried, and processed into Granurin, a granular fertilizer that can be used directly on farms with conventional equipment.
Inside the Kissamaja.
According to the initiative, this approach captures around 80% of the nitrogen and 50% of the phosphorus in domestic wastewater. In doing so, it prevents these nutrients from entering rivers and oceans, where they can cause eutrophication and dead zones. It also significantly reduces pressure on aging wastewater infrastructure. A 2025 life-cycle assessment showed that diverting urine can reduce wastewater-treatment-plant pollution, lowering contributions to marine eutrophication by over 50%, acidification by 45%, and global warming potential by 20%.
Sanitation360 has demonstrated its model at scale, collecting over 50,000 liters of urine from public events and working with farmers to grow barley fertilized with Granurin. In one EU-funded project, this barley was brewed into beer, a tangible example of circular economy in action. The company is also piloting permanent installations in buildings and exploring export opportunities in countries such as South Africa and Guatemala.
S360s urine fertilizer granules.
The initiative’s ambitions are equally bold. By 2035, it aims to equip over 200 arenas across Europe with its urine collection systems, establish Kissamaja® as a standard in mobile sanitation, and secure EU regulations that support nutrient recycling in new buildings. It is also developing a new food label, LEIF (Low Environmental Impact Fertilizer), to certify products grown with circular fertilizers and encourage market adoption.
Sanitation360 sees its work as essential to staying within planetary boundaries. Each person produces enough nutrients daily to grow the grain for a loaf of bread, yet most of the nutrients in urine get flushed away and end up polluting waterways instead of growing food. By turning that waste into a local, renewable fertilizer, Sanitation360 is not just closing the nutrient loop. It’s building a more resilient, climate-smart food system from the ground—and the bathroom—up.
Written by Sarah Souli Photos provided by Sanitation360
Country: Sweden
A small reactor in Uppsala may hold the key to cutting the fertilizer industry’s massive carbon footprint—by replicating nature’s own nitrogen fixation process.
UPPSALA, Sweden –
On a January morning in the Swedish university town of Uppsala, a group of scientists gathered in a laboratory within a modest cluster of buildings known as the Green Innovation Park and activated a small electromagnetic reactor. They watched through a window as the reactor, enclosed in a hermetically sealed room, began to heat up, cycling plasma and gases through an intricate system of tubes and machinery that has the potential to reshape the future of agriculture.
“See where the tubes are coming out like a flower around the reactor? It’s extremely intense inside,” said Gustaf Forsberg, the Swedish physicist-turned- startup-founder who dreamed up the core technology behind the reactor. “The temperature in the plasma, we cannot measure it, but we know it goes above 3000 degrees. Look, there is a little fluorescence coming out on the lower left house.”
“If we hadn’t just changed the adaptor, you’d see florescence coming from the tubes,” said Sankha Nanayakkara, a young scientist who became obsessed with electromagnetics as a child when his father’s ice cream shop in Sri Lanka kept being struck by lightning. Nanayakkara is part of the 20-person team behind NitroCapt, the company Forsberg founded in the belief that it could represent a watershed moment for the global food system.
NitroCapt reactor lab, Martin Porstendörfer and Sankha Nanayakkara, working with the technology in the lab in Uppsala. Gustaf Forsberg next to his tractor at this family farm in Ransta, Sweden. He has been able to test out Nitro Capt on his own farmland.
The process inside the reactor room is producing nitrate, a key component in fertilizer. This technology, which uses plasma to break apart nitrogen molecules, mimicking the way lightning naturally fixes nitrogen in the atmosphere, has the potential to revolutionize the fertilizer industry, which is currently responsible for around 2.7 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Aysu Kayalıoğlu in NitroCapt’s Fertilizer lab, pouring some granulated fertilizer into a container before testing the water content.
“That’s the same range as the entire aviation industry,” says Forsberg. “Most people are aware of the impact of aviation, and not so many are aware of this.” It’s a staggering statistic. The very thing that feeds the world, that props up agriculture from Kansas to Kenya, does as much damage to our planet as all the planes in the sky. For decades, this has been the price of abundance. Nitrogen fertilizers have helped sustain billions, yet their production depends on fossil fuels, belching out carbon at an astronomical scale. But what if that price didn’t have to be paid?
That’s the proposition behind NitroCapt, which aims to disrupt one of agriculture’s biggest carbon culprits. Its proprietary technology uses only oxygen, water, and renewable energy to fix nitrogen directly from the air, eliminating the need for hydrogen, a costly and energy-intensive component in traditional fertilizer production. This breakthrough makes the process far more sustainable than both conventional ammonia-based fertilizers and emerging green hydrogen alternatives. If the technology can scale, it could not only slash emissions but also change the balance of global food security.
“There are grey alternatives with a decent price, and there are green alternatives that are still quite far from cost-efficient,” says Forsberg. NitroCapt, he explains, is “the only alternative which is both green and exceptionally cost efficient.”
Forsberg, a charismatic, slightly eccentric figure, isn’t your typical startup founder. He grew up on a farm in Sweden, still cultivates grains on his family’s century-old farmstead, and speaks about electromagnetics with a childlike enthusiasm. Before starting NitroCapt in 2016, he was one of the key people behind ThermoSeed, which pioneered a chemical-free alternative for seed disinfection, reducing the industry’s reliance on pesticides.
Gustaf Forsberg walking into one of the barns on his family farm in Ransta, Sweden.
Forsberg came up with the idea that led to NitroCapt while contemplating an entirely different topic: a process used by the combustion industry to combat acid rain, which involves removing nitrogen from the atmosphere.
“As an agronomist and a farmer, I felt that that’s a big waste of nitrogen,” he says.
Forsberg brought the idea to his former colleague, Peter Baeling, who offered indispensable advice, leading to the incorporation of electrically generated plasma. Through a series of investigations, the two ended up with the process behind NitroCapt’s core technology. They went on to become co-founders of the company.
NitroCapt’s pilot reactor has been running in their Uppsala lab since early 2024, and space is already set aside for their first commercial-scale reactor. Here, the team has been refining their process, ensuring their system is not just functional but modular and scalable. And while the technology is still at a pilot scale, interest is growing. The company has already secured 9 letters of intent for 33 full-scale production units, representing a future commercial value of more than €1 billion—a sign that the industry is paying attention.
Aysu Kayalıoğlu in Nitro Capt’s Fertilizer lab, testing the water content of the fertilizer.Gustaf Forsberg at one of his fields.
A Cleaner Alternative to Conventional Fertilizer
Despite its outsized contribution to the warming of our planet, the fertilizer industry flies under the radar. “Even as a farmer, one doesn’t think much about where nitrogen fertilizers come from and how they affect the environment,” says Henrik Lillje, a Swedish farmer and crop consultant. “But you scratch the surface, and you see that they are causing a huge amount of emissions.”
The problem lies in how nitrogen fertilizer is made. Since the early 20th century, the Haber-Bosch process has been the foundation of industrial agriculture, pulling nitrogen from the air and turning it into ammonia using massive amounts of natural gas. The result is a product that brings necessary plant nutrients into fields, lending them high productivity but at the price of a massive carbon footprint.
And yet, the world has grown to depend on it. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers led to enormous yield increases during the Green Revolution and are a key component of modern conventional farming systems. Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, global food production would plummet by close to 50 percent if no alternatives were used, meaning we could only feed a fraction of the planet’s current population. The industry itself is massive—with an annual sales value of more than $80 billion—and deeply entrenched in geopolitics.
The geopolitical nature of the industry came to the fore in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when fertilizer prices skyrocketed, exposing just how fragile the global supply chain is.
“There’s an urgent need in developing countries for domestic production of fertilizer,” said Kristina Mastroianni, a consultant who has worked for on large-scale agricultural development aid projects and sees enormous potential in NitroCapt’s model. “The opportunity I see here with their modular system is that they can be placed anywhere,” she says. “You can have smaller entities that supply the region to avoid supply chain issues.”
For smallholder farmers in developing nations, access to fertilizer is precarious and unaffordable. Recent supply chain issues, Mastroianni explains, “have had great impact everywhere, but a much higher impact on the poor farmers in these countries. They don’t have access at all to something that is life or death.”
By decentralizing production and cutting reliance on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, NitroCapt’s model could provide a way for countries to secure domestic production, insulating them from market volatility. With 80 percent of nitrogen fertilizer currently produced in a handful of politically fraught regions, the ability to produce fertilizer locally would be a game-changer.
Henrik Lillje, the Swedish farmer, is skeptical but hopeful. “It’s a beautiful product… It’s almost too good to be true,” he says. “If they can make it economically competitive, I would say it should sweep the market.”
Martin Porstendörfer, R&D manager at NitroCapt, works on the cooling technology of the reactor in the lab.Photographed through the copper pipes that run from the reactor room to the cooling room.
Can Green Fertilizer be Competitive in the Market?
That’s the key question: Can they make it competitive? Right now, green fertilizers are more expensive to produce than traditional ones, largely because of the high cost of green hydrogen, the usual alternative to fossil fuel-based ammonia production. NitroCapt’s method, however, bypasses hydrogen entirely by converting oxygen and nitrogen from the air into nitrate through a plasma-chemical process. The hope is that once the company reaches industrial scale, its costs will drop below traditional methods.
Forsberg explains that NitroCapt’s roadmap focuses first on scaling the technology from small to large-scale production, a step that will already make them competitive in markets like Europe. Over the next few years, NitroCapt plans to increase energy efficiency further by integrating advanced heat recovery technologies.
He sees an even greater shift ahead. “When we go to these levels, there will not be any reason anymore to produce fertilizer with any other technology,” says Forsberg. “This is basically zero-emission from the nitrogen fixation process,” he says. “And in addition, we are making the best fertilizer for agriculture, because ammonia-based fertilizers acidify the soils, whereas the pure nitrate- based fertilizers slightly increase the pH of the soil. They are actually increasing, successively, the fertility of the soil.”
In an era where sustainability is the watchword, NitroCapt represents a huge opportunity. The European Union has introduced policies like Red III, which mandates that 42 percent of fertilizers in Europe be green by 2027. But skepticism runs high. “No one believes this will be possible,” says Björn Lindh, NitroCapt’s strategy director. “They put their heads in the sand.”
Farm fields in Nysätra.
Forsberg is well aware of the skepticism. The fertilizer industry is dominated by giants who have been operating the same way for a century, and they aren’t eager to upend their model. “There are hundreds of announcements about green fertilizer plants,” says Lindh. “But to my knowledge, no one has gotten funding.”
Why? Because they aren’t yet able to be competitive in the market. Even with looming regulations and carbon taxes, many producers are making the calculation that it’s cheaper to take the fines than to invest in a technology that will significantly increase production cost.
An Unstoppable Innovation
But Forsberg and his team believe they have something that changes the equation. Their reactors are already operational, producing nitrogen fertilizer with a radically lower environmental impact. With a first commercial unit on the horizon and interest from major agricultural players like VIVESCIA, a French cooperative that supports 9,000 farmers and oversees 750,000 hectares of farmland, NitroCapt’s moment may be coming faster than even Forsberg anticipated.
Forsberg knows the road ahead is steep, but he believes the momentum for green innovations like NitroCapt is unstoppable.
“The sustainable technologies will become more competitive. It will go the right way. The question is just how many bumps we shall jump over,” says Forsberg. “Ultimately, I’m optimistic.”
The alarm bells have been sounding for a long time around climate change. Less widely recognized is the growing concern about declines in soil health. While these issues may seem separate, they are deeply interconnected. But for now, let’s focus on climate. As a global community, we have less than seven years to halve our emissions to avoid the worst climate change effects—and even that won’t be enough. We need to immediately start sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Svensk Kolinlagring is on a mission to help us. The initiative is presented as Sweden’s first carbon farming program, transforming the food system towards agroecological farming. They have built a system that pays farmers for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil. Their business model aims to create a regenerative economy that contributes positively to the environment and society, by using carbon as a proxy to address a range of interconnected challenges. The solution shifts the focus away from mere compensation and carbon offsetting; instead, it emphasizes responsibility. Partners won’t be able to just “offset” their carbon—they will have to actually make a change.
The initiative functions as a living lab, where through economic incentives, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and research, participants work towards carbon-sequestering agriculture with added values such as increased soil health, biodiversity, and improved conditions for Swedish farmers.
Soil carbon is an indicator of soil health, and necessary for growing food. Adequate levels of carbon in soil provide better water retention, increased fertility, and resilience. Moving carbon from the air to the soil is the initiative’s entry point, a way to also work with biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, water issues, climate adaptation, resilience, and favorable economic conditions in agriculture. The initiative started in 2018, launched their first pilot round in 2020, and are currently setting up five-year harvest cycles on an increasing number of farms.
Svensk Kolinlagring claims that the biggest hurdle is that farmers do not have enough incentives to transition to carbon sequestering practices, nor is there a process of collaboration that facilitates the transition. Since the infrastructure—farmers and arable land—is already in place, Svensk Kolinlagring focuses on creating the incentive. Unlike other organizations working on carbon sequestration as a revenue for impact investors, Svensk Kolinlagring states they have a mission-driven approach and work with inclusive stakeholder collaboration. They have also developed their own framework to ensure credibility and effectiveness, which includes a set of criteria to measure and verify the impacts of various practices over time on a systemic level.
Around 40 farms across Sweden are already active with 100 waiting to join. By 2024, roughly a hundred companies had committed to make contributions by buying carbon credits and transformation credits, or by financing the initiative’s educational platforms or the establishment of new research sites.
Where many others focus on reductionist methods and models, the initiative is convinced that the farming system needs to be treated and modeled as the complex living system that it is. Their standards are designed to be additional, ensuring that sequestration efforts provide and long-term benefits for all stakeholders. Finally, Svensk Kolinlagring employs the “doughnut economics” framework, which combines planetary boundaries with social foundations. Ultimately, Svensk Kolinlagring works for a long-term transition to agroecological, carbon-storing, and regenerative farming practices—a food system within planetary boundaries.
Written by Sarah Souli Images provided by Svensk Kolinlagring
Country: Sweden
What if there were meat alternatives that tasted just as good as the real thing? Same texture, flavor, consistency—would that make more people switch to meat-free options? The Swedish company Millow thinks so. For the past twenty years, they’ve been perfecting their sustainable technology which they claim produces clean-label, minimally processed, nutritious vegan food with superior texture/taste at consumer-friendly prices. The secret ingredient? Mycelium.
Chief Product Officer Dr. Coralie Hellwig showing the Millowburger and Millow “meat”-balls as well the Millow minced “meat”.
Millow’s technology leverages mycelium’s properties to create a texture that remains intact when boiled or baked. A lot of vegan foods can taste a bit off—too vegetable-y, or just a bit strange, especially for consumers who are not themselves vegans and thus are accustomed to the texture of meat. According to the initiative, their products have a neutral taste that can be tailored to any flavor. Millow says their products offer complete nutrition, including protein, amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and fibers, with bioavailable vitamins and minerals.
Millow states that their production process saves energy, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and water compared with animal-based products like beef, and compared with other vegan offerings like soy-based products and other mycelium-based products such as Quorn. Switching to meatless options is a vital piece of the solution to our growing climate crisis. According to FAO data, 14.5% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to livestock farming, an industry that emits not only CO2, but also methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O).
The global population is growing, and food demand, especially for meat, is expected to increase by 60% in the next twenty-five years. Additionally, water, a key component in livestock farming, is increasingly scarce. 2500 out of the 3000 liters of fresh water we use daily come from our food consumption. Beef is particularly thirsty; according to the World Economic Forum, beef requires 15.5 m³ per kilogram of beef produced, a wildly unsustainable ratio. According to the initiative, compared to beef, Millow’s process saves 97% of CO2 emissions. Unlike traditional wet fermentation, Millow’s dry fermentation technology produces no waste, requires only 2.3% of the water, one-third of the energy, and one-third of the capital expenditure, reducing CO2 emissions by 90%.
Millow’s patented technology integrates unique hardware (a bioreactor) and AI-driven software, designed for cost-efficient scaling. The bioreactor is fed with a combination of plant-based substrate and mycelium spores, producing a complete food product in less than 24 hours. The output can be shaped like a meatball, burger, steak, minced meat, or non-animal shapes. Minimal processing is required, depending on the final product. Already, Millow has collaborated with major food manufacturers both in the Nordics and internationally. From fungi to burger, Millow is here to start a food revolution.
For thousands of years, humans have added fertilizer to improve soil nutrition. Historically, we have used mineral and organic fertilizers, like manure or ground-up bone, to make our food grow heartier and faster. In the last century, human-made fertilizers have helped us feed our growing planet even more efficiently. But this has caused great environmental damage, and worldwide, agriculture is the second-largest cause of climate change. Nitrogen fertilizers in particular represent a catch-22 problem: they account for 50% of the world’s food production support but emit as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as the aviation industry — a whopping total of roughly 1.1 gigatons of CO2 equivalent annually. Valued worldwide at around €80 billion, it runs on a fossil-dependent process that is badly in need of an overhaul.
Enter NitroCapt, an Uppsala-based climate-tech company that developed a novel, energy efficient process for a disruptive electrification of the global nitrogen fertilizer industry. NitroCapt has invented a unique plasma process that simultaneously maximizes the production rate and minimizes the energy consumed for nitrogen fixation. Since the company is not taking the vastly energy consuming route via ammonia, but instead a nitrate route which in theory is 11 times more energy-efficient, NitroCapt claims to be able to compete in energy efficiency with the most efficient fossil-based production process for nitrogen fertilizer—being more cost-efficient and greener than fertilizers based on both fossil fuels and green ammonia.
Adjani Isabelle, Business Development Manager, in NitroCapt’s lab.
Through years of research since they were first established in 2016, NitroCapt conclude that their plasma-produced nitrate will be the most powerful solution to address problems associated with nitrogen fertilizers on a broad scale. According to the initiative, plasma-produced nitrate offers: an outstanding production economy, matching the needs of global large-acre crops and giving strong incentive for a fast transition of the industry; the lowest total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of any synthetic green nitrogen fertilizer; the best agronomic properties, with a positive impact on soil fertility; and resilient production on a moderate scale that is immune to disruptions to international trade.
NitroCapt has established a pilot program that is currently being implemented in Sweden and plans to implement in France, though their long-term goal is to see plasma-produced nitrate used worldwide. The company reports that they have LOIs (letters of intent) from customers for 31 full-scale plants, each one with a capacity to provide fertilizer for 50,000–80,000 hectares of farmland. When implemented, NitroCapt believes this will reduce GHGs by close to 1million tons per year. The production units are set up in containers that are easy to mount and ship, which means scalability will not be an issue. NitroCapt states that their goal is to install 1400 units within 10 years, resulting in annual emission reductions of nearly 100 million tons of CO2 equivalents in 2034, which represents more than double Sweden’s total emissions as a country (45 million tons of CO2 equivalents in 2023).
In addition, NitroCapt claims that their technology has the potential to become a solution to provide affordable nitrogen fertilizers to increase food production in developing countries. A new way of growing food and feeding our planet is here.
Written by Sarah Souli Images provided by NitroCapt
Country: Sweden
Could an all-natural steam seed treatment replace mainstream agricultural chemical treatments? ThermoSeed thinks so.
UPPSALA, Sweden –
When Bjørn Stabbetorp, CEO of the Agricultural Division of the Norwegian agriculture co-op Felleskjøpet, began approaching farmers in southern Norway in the late 2000s to convince them to use an all-natural steam seed treatment coming from their Swedish neighbors, he was met with mixed responses.
“Some farmers bought the argument that it would be good to use less chemical products,” he says. “But others were more skeptical about ‘natural treatments.’ They wanted to stick with what they knew.”
At the time, the burgeoning Swedish seed treatment company ThermoSeed was promising a new, novel technique that could protect Norway’s crops from pests and pathogens and better safeguard the health of their environment and farm workers. But even some environmentally minded farmers were doubtful. At the time, seed treatments were considered a chemical process.
Droplets of water collect on the top of wheat sprouts. These samples in the climate chamber have been treated with ThermoSeed recipe, at the company’s laboratory on the SLU, Swedish University of Agricultural Science Campus. The chamber is 90% humid 18–25C and it takes 2 weeks for sprouting.
Felleskjøpet evaluated ThermoSeed’s proposition for six years before finally deciding to test their product in 2012. When farmers went to harvest their oats that autumn, their yields were plentiful.
“It worked,” says Stabbetorp. “Now, we try to use ThermoSeed on as many of our seeds as possible.”
ThermoSeed is a Swedish innovation that started from a simple but powerful idea: we can treat seeds, protecting them from pests and pathogens, using nothing but hot, humid air. The goal? To replace pesticides with an all-natural technique, eliminating hazardous agrochemicals from our environment. Since ThermoSeed began operating fifteen years ago, they have protected the region’s rivers, lakes, and soils from an estimated 3,000 cubic meters of chemicals that would have been applied to seeds had ThermoSeed not existed. If scaled up, steam seed pasteurization has the potential to not only replace pesticides but also make crops more productive throughout the globe.
Employee of Lantmännen BioAgri AB/ThermoSeed, preparing soil for seeds treated with ThermoSeed recipe at the company’s lab- oratory on the SLU, Swedish University of Agricultural Science Campus.
“The ThermoSeed treatment is as effective at killing off pests as any chemical alternative,” says Stabbetorp. “But ThermoSeed has some extra benefits: no exposure to chemical pesticides.”
It’s a freezing Tuesday morning, and Kenneth Alness, the innovator behind ThermoSeed, is driving us through the Swedish countryside. The sun, out for only a few hours in early January, lights up the red wooden houses dotting the snow. As we drive, Alness points out his homeland’s historical sites: the wooden hut where Viking kings were selected, a ridge formed during the Ice Age dividing Uppsala from Stockholm, and the 12th-century red church where he and his wife married.
This handheld seed spreader holds the seed samples of wheat varieties ready to be distributed in the soil at the company’s laboratory on the Uppsala University Campus.
From this corner of the world, Alness, 67, has spent his life dreaming up a solution he believes could have global implications: replacing chemical pesticides with steam seed treatments.
The intricacies of seed treatment may seem like a niche topic of interest only to those working in the agricultural industry. But how we treat seeds has far-reaching societal implications on our food, environment, and health.
Today, most crop seeds must be treated to avoid disease and protect their yield potential. Otherwise, there is a high risk of crop failure, which could cause food security issues and bankrupt farmers. For decades, pesticides have seemed like the only option despite their well-documented problems: 22% of European rivers and lakes are contaminated with pesticides, and 84% of participants’ bloodstreams in a recent survey contained pesticides.
Kenneth Alness, the inno- vator behind ThermoSeed, looks out onto Swedish farmland along the road leading to his family home in the little town of Knivsta, Sweden.
This is where ThermoSeed comes in: the natural technique, which involves steaming crop seeds, eliminates chemicals from that part of the agricultural process.
Alness first got the idea for steam seed treatment while visiting his father-in-law in the 1990s. He found a book tucked in the older man’s bookshelf, explaining that seeds were treated with hot water before the rise of agrochemicals in the 1950s. Alness began to wonder: Could we treat seeds with steam?
He hypothesized that we could “bathe” away fungi from seeds by creating a steam sauna that would kill off pests and pathogens. By determining the right amount of seed exposure to hot, humid air, Alness thought that he could immunize seeds from pests and pathogens while also improving their growing power. The result would be a tailored humidity “recipe” for each seed lot. Alness and his team tested his theory for a decade, conducting more than forty trials across Sweden, Germany, France, and Italy.
Alexander Alness, son of the founder and employee of Lantmännen BioAgri, Anders Kraff, CEO of Lantmännen BioAgri AB and Kenneth Alness inspect the sprouting wheat. The samples that are growing have been treated with ThermoSeed recipe, at the company’s laboratory on the SLU, Swedish University of Agricultural Science Campus.
His experiments proved promising: the studies revealed that steam seed treatment could be as effective as chemical alternatives and that it resulted in higher crop yields. In Europe, crops that used steam-treated seeds saw a 5-10% increase in yield production. In Mali, ThermoSeed trials increased production by up to 27%.
“We knew we had a new technology that could change agriculture,” says Alness.
Father and son, Kenneth and Alexander Alness, in front of the ThermoSeed laboratory on the SLU, Swedish University of Agricultural Science Campus.
Since entering the marketplace in 2008 with its first full-scale equipment at the Swedish agricultural cooperative Lantmännen, ThermoSeed has been very successful. In Sweden alone, the company estimates they have been able to avoid applying two million liters of pesticides from the environment. Each year, 160,000 tons of seeds globally are treated using the ThermoSeed technique. Though ThermoSeed has a relatively small number of clients, roughly a dozen spread across Europe and North America, these customers are huge conglomerates. In Sweden, 40% of certified seeds come from ThermoSeed. In Norway, Felleskjøpet, ThermoSeed’s Norwegian customer, accounts for 50% of the accredited cereal seeds in the country.
ThermoSeed’s success is partly thanks to changes in European environmental and agricultural laws over the past decade. In 2020, the European Union (EU) approved the Green New Deal, which commits the European Commission to reduce the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50% by 2030, thus increasing demand for sustainable treatments like Thermoseed.
Mike Fransson, Kenneth Alness and Anders Krafft inspecting the large scale ThermoSeed machine that can process 15 tons of seeds an hour. It is the largest machine currently in use and one of three in Sweden.
At the same time, market demand for natural foods has also increased as people have become more environmentally conscious. Since the early 2000s, market shares for organic foods have tripled to more than 5% in Germany and the United States, and reaching up to a 9-12% share of the Swedish market in 2018.
“There has been a huge change in people’s perception since the 1990s,” says Alness. “Now, the customers want climate friendly products.”
When ThermoSeed first appeared on the market, pesticide companies dismissed the idea, warning customers that the products might not be effective.
“The chemical companies didn’t believe there could be an alternative,” says Stabbetorp. “They gave us all kinds of arguments as to why [ThermoSeed] wouldn’t work.”
An employee loads a truck at the Lantmännen’s ThermoSeed facility that will deliver the bags of seeds to farmers throughout Scandinavia. Each bag holds 500kg of treated seeds.
Today, many companies that previously criticized ThermoSeed are turning to them to replicate their model.
“These agrochemical companies are aware the world around them is shifting,” says Anders Krafft, the CEO of Lantmännen BioAgri AB, which now owns the ThermoSeed method and trademark. “They know they have to change tactics.”
Although tides are turning away from agrochemicals, there is still work remaining to make seed steam pasteurization financially viable. While steam seed treatment is cheaper in the long term than agrochemicals, it does require significant initial investment.
Unlike pesticides, which are a one-size-fits-all approach to pest eradication, steam seed pasteurization is tailored to a given seed lot. This means that before a seed can be treated, a sample of the seed lot is sent to a laboratory right outside Uppsala. Here, the seed is tested at various conditions to determine the optimal combination of humidity, temperature, and time. The result is a “recipe” tailored to each seed lot that eradicates diseases, enhances seed vigor, and promotes optimal germination. Once this recipe is determined, seeds are treated using specialized ThermoSeed equipment.
ThermoSeed equipment is expensive, and it takes seven years before buyers begin to see a monetary payoff. While agricultural co-ops in more affluent countries can afford this investment, many farmers in poorer countries need help, putting the ThermoSeed method out of reach for those who require it most.
“Climate and environmental considerations are always priority number one,” Alness says. “But the finances have to keep up.”
Alness is searching for a solution: he has designed a new machine that would be cheaper and use less water and energy, which he hopes to get on the market within the coming years. Lantmännen BioAgri are at the same time working with a faster and remote-controlled recipe system to simplify global expansion.
Friends and former colleagues Kenneth Alness and Gustaf Forsberg, sitting in front of the faculty cafeteria on the SLU, Swedish University of Agricultural Science Campus. Gustaf Forsberg, a former employee of ThermoSeed (he also wrote his dissertation on it) has worked with Kenneth for 20 years.
Scientists who have studied ThermoSeed say that if questions around initial investment are solved, the technique could have transformative impacts on the global agricultural system.
“The advantages are obvious: we don’t introduce pesticide into the growing cycle of the crop, and we increase yields,” says Gustaf Forsberg, who wrote his PhD on ThermoSeed at SLU, the Swedish Agricultural University. Globally, he says, these increased yields could reduce the land required for farming.
For Forsberg, who is now a farmer himself, ThermoSeed is also ushering a new way of working for farmers: “We can touch ThermoSeed treated seed with our bare hands and not worry about the impact it is having on our health.”
Alexander Alness, picking up a container with soil that contains samples of wheat varieties. These samples in the climate chamber have been treated with ThermoSeed recipe, at the company’s laboratory on the SLU, Swedish University of Agricultural Science Campus.
Alness’s innovation has taken him around the world: he has met with farmers in Kazakhstan, agricultural co-ops in India, and interested buyers in China. In Sweden, he has won many sustainability prizes, receiving a visit in his laboratory from the Swedish Crown Princess.
But for Alness, the success of ThermoSeed is a family victory that unfolded here in the Swedish countryside. His grandparents were farmers, cultivating the land near where he now lives. His son, Alexander, is the laboratory leader where the special seed “recipes” are developed, and the idea for steam pasteurization came from his father-in-law’s book.
“It’s a wonderful life story,” he says. “To work on something you believe in.”
At the end of our drive, Alness points out a red house on the right. “That’s mine,” he says. A home with a solar-paneled covered roof sits in the middle of the farmland. Every morning, Alness laps the fields surrounding his house with cross-country skis strapped to his feet.
“Nature has always been in my heart,” he says. “We all need to find strategies to protect it.”
