Rooted in Soil Health
When I graduated from business school in 2017, I thought I had made up my mind to pursue a job that would provide me with a stable income and decent career stability. After eight years working for a solar energy startup — despite the company’s eventual success and subsequent sale — I thought I was ready for a new chapter and to take some risk off the table. This was not, however, the reason I went to business school. I decided to go to grad school to build the tools I needed to start an entrepreneurial venture with a positive environmental impact. Within a few weeks of graduation, I was firmly on my path to founding Rooted. I was, and am, following my heart and my passion to make a positive impact.
For nearly a decade, while at my solar company, I read books by some of the most innovative farmers of this century and last. Albrecht, Salatin, Savory and Logsden wrote about ameliorating agricultural land through compost, rotational grazing and cover cropping, leading to improved yields, profitability and enhanced environmental sustainability. Rooted (the name came later) was founded on the principle that environmental sustainability on the farm, stewarded properly, can be a primary driver of farm profitability.
As you improve the health of your soil through stewardship of the land, the land can provide more essential nutrients to the crop, at a lower cost and more consistently than poor soils with high fertilizer and biocide requirements. Rooted is a for-profit company whose profits are derived from soil health. Hence, the company is Rooted in Soil Health. Rooted describes the underlying mission and the mode of profit.
Rooted in soil health, rooted in ecology, rooted in utilizing the wealth of the natural world to optimize the productivity of the agricultural ecosystem, rooted in the regeneration of soils, in the restoration of land, air, and waterways, all to the benefit and the bottom line of a farm — its productivity and profitability.
A for-profit company, the company’s founding principle is for profits to be derived from enhancement of soil health. In order for the business to achieve scale and scaled impact, Rooted must be profitable and the profitability must come from the restoration of agricultural soils. Incredibly, by nature’s design, this is the case. Restored ecosystem function in an agricultural context does lead to higher profitability.
Rooted, effectively, is a design company that takes cues from nature to improve agricultural soils to maximize photosynthesis and optimize productivity. Restored soils require fewer inputs. This translates to reduced petro-chemical fertilizers and biocides. The reduction of these inputs reduces the amount of biocides that show up in our foods. Reduced inputs also means less nutrients and biocides reaching our waterways that cause dead zones, reduced food poisoning (from contaminated water used on our crops), not to mention reduced ecosystem function for its own sake.
Reduced inputs also contribute to a positive feedback loop of further restoring the soil, a key marker of healthy soils in life. Bio-cides, literally life-killer, works against that goal. Life in soil, specifically bacterial and fungal matter scavenge for nutrients in the soil and provide it to the plant’s roots in exchange for carbon produced by the plants from photosynthesis.
In healthy soils where a healthy microbiome thrives in the soil, nutrient cycling improves and the plants become healthier and more nutrient dense, leading to healthier food and healthier people. Improved soil health improves soil function, it leads to cleaner waterways, air quality, increased nutrient density, crop health, farmer health, consumer health, the health of fisheries, and in the quantity and diversity of species on farm and throughout the community. And as the primary driver of soil health is organic carbon in the soil, it sequesters carbon too, aiding in the fight against global climate change. And doing all this increases farm resilience and farm profitability.
The name Rooted is a reminder to the purpose of and the thesis behind the business. As the business scales from startup to $100M or even $1B, impact will not be left behind; impact is part in parcel with the profits of the endeavor: Rooted in Soil Health.
