Mustafa: How Forgotten Crops Could Fix the Food System & Why Nobody Is Growing Them Yet — with Mustafa Durgun, Founder of Sovereign Yields Initiative

We grow fewer than 20 crops to feed 8 billion people. Meanwhile, thousands of nutritious, climate-resilient crops are sitting in the ground: forgotten, stigmatized, and completely ignored by the market. Why?In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Mustafa Durgun, founder of the Sovereign Yields Initiative, to expose one of the most overlooked blind spots in our food system: the crops we stopped growing not because they failed us, but because we built an entire industrial machine around the ones that did.Mustafa grew up in Istanbul, obsessed with what food represents culturally, historically, and politically. That obsession took him from selling potatoes in Germany to designing climate-resilient food projects in Angola, to now working on transforming his own family's stagnant goat farm in Turkey into a regenerative system. Along the way, he learned something most food system thinkers avoid saying out loud: farmers don't grow what's good for the planet. They grow what pays.In this conversation, Mustafa reveals:Why neglected crops carry a stigma of poverty and how that shame is the real barrier to adoptionHow to reintroduce forgotten crops without asking anyone to consciously choose themWhy the knowledge gap, the value chain gap, and the financial clarity gap are the three locks keeping these crops out of the marketWhat ready-to-use therapeutic foods could unlock for global nutrition, and why his best proposal never got fundedWhy "fully local food systems" may be more of a feel-good myth than a resilience strategyHow to navigate EU grant applications when you're working on crops nobody has researched yetAnd what food sovereignty actually means when you strip away the buzzwordsAnd much more...🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 ⁠⁠Linkedin⁠⁠📸 ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠😊 The Guest: ⁠Mustafa Durgun