Field Notes: Vow eyes high-value cultured meat niche; Stafford timber fund nears $1bn target; PeakBridge hits $187m final close

Tenacious-backed Vow eyes high-value cultured meat niche and Stafford Capital Partners ’ timber fund nears its $1 billion target. Meanwhile, PeakBridge and Edmond de Rothschild agtech fund hits $187 million final close; Louis Dreyfus Company 's bid to acquire Namoi Cotton raises competition red flags, and more. Welcome to Field Notes, the start-of-the-week briefing from Agri Investor.

Tips and feedback to Binyamin Ali or email [email protected].

First look

Vow sets sights on high-value cultured meat niche

Australian cultured meat start-up Vow turned heads last year when it revealed its first product – a mammoth meatball created from the DNA of the extinct creature.

The reason for the leftfield choice was simple, Vow chief executive George Peppou tells Agri Investor.

The company has no intention of creating and competing with conventional meat products. It wants to carve out a niche of high-value meat products that are entirely novel and are not available anywhere else. Read the full story...

They said it

“At the end of the day, that environmental factor is overriding everything else, regardless of its weight, and you are deciding solely based on that”

Arkansas Teacher Retirement System executive director Mark White summarises the sentiment of the state’s ESG Oversight Committee, which continues to monitor UBS, a GP with which ATRS has made investments.

Policy

Agribusiness lobbying overfunded?

Agribusiness lobbying expenditures in the US have risen 22 percent over the past five years to total $523 million, said an analysis of federal disclosures by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In a report titled Cultivating Control, the nonprofit UCS reports that lobbying disclosures compiled by OpenSecrets reveal $3.25 billion in spending on corporate lobbying between 1998 and 2023 in total, with agribusiness rising from $145 million in 2019 to $177 million last year. Read the full story here

VC fundraising

ByHeart , a British clean label children’s nutrition company, raised $95 million in a funding round to support its US commercial launch. The business has been backed by investors including D1 Capital Partners, Bellco Capital, Polaris Partners and Red Sea Ventures among others.

Pepper, a US-based e-commerce platform for food distributors, raised $30 million in a funding round led by Iconiq Growth with participation from Harmony Partners, Index Ventures, Greylock and Imaginary. Read more....

Read this week's Field Notes in full on Agri Investor now....