Gates Ag One opens office in St. Louis to accelerate collaboration
The Bill & Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations (Gates Ag One) has announced the opening of its home office in St. Louis.
Gates Ag One, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, works to accelerate breakthrough agricultural research to address the needs of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, including projects in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, India, and Bangladesh. The nonprofit connects companies, researchers, and stakeholders to create pipelines for innovative solutions to address challenges, improve crop yields, and make crops more resilient to the effects of climate change, disease, and pests.
Locating Gates Ag One in St. Louis facilitates collaboration with the region’s biotech and life sciences ecosystem, which includes global agricultural science companies, start-ups, and research institutes and universities. Roughly half of all agricultural production in the United States sits within a 500-mile radius of St. Louis, AgFunderNews reports.
According to AgFunderNews, in 2023, Gates Ag One awarded $35 million to a Cambridge University-led project developing self-fertilizing crops, and in 2022 awarded $34 million to the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project, an international research initiative centered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“This is an exciting moment for Gates Ag One,” said the organization’s chief operating officer, Al Gallegos. “We believe in the power of working collaboratively to address the needs of smallholder farmers by creating solutions alongside our partners.
(Photo credit: Getty Images/Ernest Kung)
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