“Lupins potentially have the highest protein yield of any crop,” says professor Kleijn. “But there are two challenges: this is a crop with low productivity and rather variable protein content. As a result, lupins are not profitable enough for normal arable farming, and little energy has been put into developing processing methods for using protein from lupins in food production. We want to see if we can change this with a clever combination of breeding, the use of pollinators other than the honeybee and research into using lupin proteins in meat substitutes. My ambition is to stop people from seeing lupins simply as a niche product and to develop them into a fully-fledged European alternative for soybean. This may seem ambitious, but I really believe it is possible.”

Because lupins are a relatively young crop in terms of crop development and breeding for human consumption, Kleijn sees opportunities to stabilise the protein content of the seeds via breeding. “We can achieve a lot this way, especially if we take the role of wild pollinators into account in the breeding programmes. The lupin flower has a tripping mechanism that requires a fairly heavy insect to effectively transfer pollen from one plant to the next. The honeybees used by most farmers are too light and too small for this, which may partially explain the low productivity. The bigger and heavier bumblebee seems more suitable for this task. In earlier times, when lupins were part of the crop rotation in the Netherlands, it was bumblebees that collected pollen from them. In the project we want to start now, we are going to study the added value of bumblebees. We might even succeed in bringing back the nearly extinct ruderal bumblebee back in the landscape, in which case this project will truly be more than the sum of its parts.”