The Largest Carbon Sink You’ve Never Heard Of
By Oleksiy Zhuk, President Cloud Agronomics
Cloud Agronomics is excited to announce our remote Carbon Index. By accurately quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) down to over 30cm depth, we provide annual verification of SOC in farmland to enable soil-based carbon sequestration markets across the globe.
Find us at www.cloud.ag
In the last few years, companies and governments have set emissions goals that are more aspirational than ever. The Paris Agreement, Microsoft’s commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030, and the recent, bipartisan Growing Climate Solutions Act are just examples of the growing recognition that our climate needs immediate attention.
To meet these goals, many stakeholders are turning to carbon drawdown measures rather than simply reducing their emissions. And reinforcing the ability of natural ecosystems to do so, through processes like photosynthesis, has garnered much attention. This process of “offsetting” carbon emissions is a crucial piece of the puzzle, and it requires various industries to incentivize “good behavior” and climate-friendly decisions.
Carbon sequestration in farmland could be the answer to this carbon conundrum. We discuss it in depth here.
Where does farmland fit into climate change?
In short, agriculture today operates with one goal in mind: produce the most food at the lowest cost. Though efficient, this process can have lasting consequences. Degradation of long-term soil health and low-quality food that goes to animals rather than humans are just some of those. And a hidden downside is that degraded soil also releases large amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere.
That said, it is important to remember that, above all, farmers are stewards of their land. Without healthy land, and a delicate balance of water, light, temperature, nutrients, and soil, it isn’t possible to sustainably produce food. That is why a new wave of restorative farming practices is gaining momentum.
But, perhaps the most compelling part of restorative farming is that it lets soil capture more carbon.
Experts have known for years that soil can play an important role as a solution to climate change. In fact, some believe that agricultural soils around the world have the ability to sequester a trillion tons of carbon, the cumulative amount of carbon humans have released since the Industrial Revolution.
How would capturing carbon in the soil work?
For the first time, the major producers and consumers of soil carbon credits have aligned incentives. Growers are desperate for additional income, while the private sector seeks to satisfy the growing consumer demand for environmentally-friendly, ethically-produced consumer products. With the market’s desire, the Earth’s need, and the science backing the benefits of a more climate-friendly ag industry, now is the time to make market-driven soil carbon sequestration a reality.
Simply put, carbon market-makers have already collectively signed up tens of millions of farmland acres to platforms which connect growers and landowners to carbon credit buyers. These landowners receive per-acre subsidies for adopting regenerative farming practices — such as reduced tilling, cover-cropping, and managed grazing — that are known to increase the natural carbon stocks in soil.
If the solution is clear, why hasn’t it become common practice?
The crux of the problem is verification — there is currently no way to affordably track the effect of regenerative farming on SOC across global farmlands. The status-quo is physical dirt sampling, which simply cannot scale across hundreds of millions of acres. Private companies, NGOs, and government agencies have tried everything from drones to satellites to create an accurate and affordable measurement of soil carbon levels at scale. Until now, every solution has fallen short: too expensive, inaccurate, or limited by scale.
Cloud Agronomics has created the world’s first remote Carbon measurement product that is accurate, scalable, and cost-effective.
Based in Boulder, Colorado — home of several world-class climate, ecosystem, and remote-sensing labs — the company began researching remote methods for soil carbon measurement in 2018. Our team, spanning physical, biological and chemical sciences, has developed a breakthrough approach to using airborne spectroscopy to deconstruct the chemical composition of soil. Through years of data collection campaigns, a network of hundreds of farms across the continental US, and proprietary technology, we have overcome the three barriers preventing other methodologies from serving as an effective verifier for soil-based carbon sequestration projects.
First, we are scalable.
Our product is derived from custom remote sensing data collected from aircraft. As a result, we have already executed our SOC analysis upon millions of acres and have the operational capacity to deploy at scale in any geography of interest.
Our approach is the first optimized for large-scale implementation.
Accurate.
The feature-rich, high-resolution nature of our spectral data allows us to extract SOC for every pixel we collect. This high resolution allows us to observe SOC variation within fields that indicate management practices, drainage, irrigation equipment, and physical boundaries. It also allows us to leverage our approach to impute accurate carbon concentration down to over 30cm depth.
Our sampling design captured representative validation sets across highly varied geography, soil coverage, crop type, soil type, climate, and moisture profile. Our cloud-based computing and AI environment enables consistent and timely terabyte-scale SOC results.
The result is >90% absolute relative accuracy.
Sustainably cost-effective.
One of the obvious benefits of our approach is the fact that pixels are cheap, much cheaper than a truck with a drill machine driving onto a field, spending the better part of a day collecting dirt.
While the cost of physical sampling is fixed per-acre, our price of collection decreases with scale.
The Bottom Line
Climate change is complicated. As such, solutions to climate change are complicated. They require disparate industries to align on a greater goal, and act upon it in unison.
I am not going to try and convince you that there is a panacea to climate change. Soil-based carbon sequestration is not the solution to climate change.
However, given the aligned incentives, increasing body of supporting scientific literature, and the promise of being more cost-effective than existing precedents, wouldn’t it make sense to give growers the opportunity to become a definitive part of the solution?
We’re here to help make that happen.
For inquiries of any kind, contact press@cloud.ag
