My Nonprofit Reviews

New Harvest has shaped the emerging field of cellular agriculture like no one else. They funded the not always glamorous but crucial basic research when others wanted to rush the idea of cultivated meat to market. New Harvest is in it for the long haul because they care about the impact of cellular agriculture, not the profit potential of it. They have consistently raised the hard but necessary questions and sparked important conversations about the why and the how of cultivated meat when others were focusing almost solely on the when. New Harvest understands the urgency of animal alternatives, but they also understand and are not afraid to talk about the risks, the biggest one of all being the risk that it will never come to pass and have the history making impact we hope it will if things go wrong. Getting ahead of what could go wrong so that we can harness the power of what could go right, and assuring that cellular agriculture reaches it's potential to do good for everyone, not only for a privileged few, has been New Harvest's mission since day one.

New Harvest is the only non-profit dedicated to using science and innovation to solve the enormous problems created by factory farming by making it obsolete with healthy, humane, sustainable "animal" products that don't require animals. Having come into existence in 2005 and hiring it's first full-time staff, Director Isha Datar, less than two years ago, New Harvest has since achieved impressive results with very limited funds and resources.

One of it's biggest assets is it's ability to mobilize and inspire an ever growing network of volunteers and supporters that have so far allowed New Harvest to remain decentralized and flexible, and to be able to jump at several opportunities at a moment's notice.

One example is New Harvest's instrumental role in giving rise to a new for profit entity to create lab cultured milk to replace conventional dairy milk from cows. In the span of a few months time, New Harvest helped Muufri (pronounced "Moo-free") co-founders Perumal Gandhi and Ryan Pandya apply for a grant to jumpstart their research, incorporate, obtain venture capital funding, and set up a headquarters in California.

Acting as a hub for the wide variety of individuals interested in creating animal product alternatives, New Harvest is an organizing force to help the world solve a wide variety of problems, including the environmental devastation of the modern meat industry and the largest sources of animal cruelty on the planet, that touch every one of our lives with a simple solution: instead of trying to improve on the broken systems we have, replace them with something better.