Making Sense of Soil Carbon Sequestration in the Fight Against Global Climate Change
Almost no farmers deny climate change – those who have been on the land for decades know that climatic patterns have changed from the past. The changes run from variations in sowing and harvest dates, to increased droughts and floods, to even more bizarre instances like the many vintners in Oregon who will now let the birds eat their crop because the grapes’ taste has been significantly altered by heavy smoke from wildfires, something that is unprecedented.
As a result, farmers have had to learn to adapt to these changes. One of these ways is by adopting precision agriculture, which enables them to grow more crops with efficient use of resources. But now, precision agriculture also has the potential to enable farmers to mitigate climate change – lessen its impact on the planet. Mitigation is very important – no one wants to continue to experience droughts and floods with increasing severity every decade. And the time is now – with every passing year, it becomes much harder to reduce climate change and its many positive feedback loops.
The UN estimates that up to 8.6 gigatons of CO2 (more than 20% of humanity’s current greenhouse gas emissions) can be sequestered every year in a very unassuming place – the carbon locked away in the soil. Carbon in the soil often originates from decaying roots and plant matter, and if this carbon is allowed to accumulate, the farm is effectively pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestering it. In addition, as an added benefit, increasing the soil carbon increases the fertility of the soil – the soil stores nutrients more effectively, holds moisture longer, and its density is reduced. Experts like Rattan Lal have written for decades about the potential benefits of soil organic carbon not only for combating climate change but also for the soil’s health. It is also considered one of the cheapest methods to sequester carbon, a tiny fraction of the cost of direct air carbon capture technologies, which have received the bulk of the mainstream media’s attention.
In a world where many major corporations are pledging to go carbon neutral or even carbon negative, it makes the most financial sense for them to invest in techniques that are the cheapest, so that they can continue to maintain their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders while achieving their sustainability goals.
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But where are we today? Why don’t we see widespread soil carbon sequestration?
There remain several key practical challenges that still need to be addressed, and I list some of them here in descending order of difficulty. For many of them, precision ag and digital technologies could play a key role:
- Proper Technical Verification: There are many well-known techniques to increase soil organic carbon, such as no-till farming, cover crops, and others. But in reality, the impact of any of these varies by farm and by the exact practices of the farmer. Furthermore, certain other practices undertaken by a farmer may actually reduce soil organic carbon, negating any benefits. So in order to verify whether what a farmer is doing is actually working, we would need to actually measure carbon levels in the soil throughout a farm (not just at a single location), and be able to compare measurements across years. When we remember that the world has more than 100 million farmers, many of whom just farm a few acres, we quickly realize that the typical ways of doing things (for example, extensive soil sampling and testing for every single farm) are really not going to move the needle on climate change. This is where ag tech can come into the picture to provide innovative and scalable solutions.
- Efficient Business Models: Today, in ag tech, our business model often involves selling a product or service where the end user is the farmer, and the ultimate payer is also the farmer. The payment ability of farmers globally is small compared to the resources of consumers in other sectors, and often rests on completely proving to every individual farmer that your technology works and can improve their operation. Thus, in the existing model, it is unclear how we could create a sustainable business that spans a significant portion of the world’s farmers. It may be time for ag tech to fundamentally rethink this business model and come up with a more efficient one that can scale much faster.
- Farmer Acquisition on a Global Scale: Finally, once we figure out the technical and business model aspects, there is the larger looming question of how to actually get to many millions of farmers. As all of us know, farmers are very geographically distributed, making true virality very difficult. Many large agribusinesses have spent several decades building out their distribution networks to reach farmers at a reasonably large scale. But, we don’t have decades to spend scaling up soil carbon sequestration for it to truly have an impact. It has to happen now. In the context of modern digital technologies, ag tech now also has the opportunity to rethink how farmer acquisition works in order to scale to millions of farmers much faster.
As of today, there are some initiatives that have tried to solve small aspects of this larger puzzle. But if we don’t address all of these major challenges, soil carbon sequestration will neither move the needle on climate change nor improve the lives of a large number of farmers.
It is in this context that my own company, ConserWater, is now launching the world’s first international soil carbon market, where corporations and governments can buy carbon credits and farmers incentivized to increase soil carbon. I now believe that technology and business development are finally at the inflection point to address these three major challenges.
Climate change is an issue that will significantly affect the course of humanity over the next several decades. It is up to all of us and every industry sector to play an active role in both mitigating and adapting to it – ag tech is no exception.
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