We are about to enter a new age of innovation. The time is quickly coming where we will need to reimagine and reinvent many of the things we are doing now. Our global biosphere is changing and we need to adapt. What is headed our way will be a pivotal and the makers, iconoclasts and inventors are going to be the ones at the vanguard of the next.

At Entogen we are using Fusion to design a critical technologies to fight against the very real risk of global food shortages by 2050. Fusion is helping us to invent technologies that will enable the industrial scale production of protein from insects, helping us create the systems that will grow bugs by the trillions.

We want to create the technologies that will enable tens of thousands of farmers to raise insects as part of the feed mix for chicken and farmed fish that are essential to global diets. We are doing this so we can enhance sustainability, food security and help invent a new agricultural sector. We believe a storm is headed our way.

The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations predicts that as our global population nears 9.2 billion by mid Centaury we will need to increase global food production by more than 60% – some say 100%. This is a challenge of massive proportions. It makes landing on the moon look easy. We need to reinvent our global food system to make it much more productive.

To make matters worse, agriculture produces approximately 9% of the 37Gt of CO2 we produce each year. If we were to simply double our agriculture efforts without changing by 2050 we could add an additional 54Gt CO2 on top of what is already being produced – that’s enough to tip the global warming scales very negatively. We simply can’t do things the same old way. The only option is reinvention. Climate change is already having a negative impact of our production capacities with fresh water scarcity being the issue we are most familiar and that is only part of the problem.

When we look to the oceans as a food source we see an equally scary scenario. According to Canadian scientists by mid centaury we could see a global collapse of most species we presently fish commercially. The impact of this is very hard to comprehend. It is starting to look like we may be facing a global protein shortage within 30 years and relatively few are looking at how to fix or fund the problem. While people hate chaos and bad news both always conspire to propel us forward. At Entogen we see what’s headed our way as one of biggest and most exiting science and business opportunities of the next 50 years.

We believe that integrating Insects into our food systems can help to rebalance the equation. Insects are very efficient protein creation engines that use the inputs of water and food with amazing efficiency. Integrating insects in animal feeds could take some of the pressure off the food supply system. Insects are sustainable and pack an impressive nutritional punch.

There is lots we need to do to realize Insect production as a real alternative. There are the technical challenge of creating the methods of mass production – we are talking levels in the tens of millions of tons – a huge undertaking and where Autodesk fits as a perfect partner for our needs.

This is a very exciting place to be experimenting and Autodesk is the perfect partner to help us make our grand visions real. At Entogen we are using Fusion 360 to brainstorm our ideas and create what we present to investors. Fusion lets us design things we can explore and evaluate, as we then tie this information to 3DSmax with both VR and Augmented reality technologies so that we can literally step into the future we are building and experience it.

Fusion is the tool we use most to transform our imaginations into the physical. The powerful 3D printing capabilities allows us to build the bits we need on small scales to actually do the science and test the systems we must scale to realize our big vision.  If you are interested in what we’re doing, check out more below!