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Agriculture and the general food ecosystem are responsible for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Growing things is a dirty business, but new technology is now offering farmers and major food companies ways to make them cleaner.
Increasing all the things we eat in the ever-increasing amounts we need depletes the soil of nutrients and produces harmful carbon emissions. Renewable agriculture aims to reduce emissions and protect the soil through various methods. These include crop rotation, cover crops, increased biodiversity, fertilization and livestock integration. Increasingly, it also includes improving the ability of crops to adapt to climate change.
One example is Ag re-growth, a startup focused on decarbonization and regeneration of agriculture. It takes satellite images, weather data, government soil maps, and observations on the ground on specific farms and feeds it all into a computer model that knows how soils and crops behave based on various conditions. Regrow Ag also works with farm management partners, incl John Deereto import crop, productivity and management data directly into its platform.
“We monitor 1.2 billion acres of farming practices so we can tell both the private and public sectors how to deal with it,” said co-founder and CEO Anastasia Volkova. “Is it good for the environment, good for water, good for soil health? Is it sustainable? Does it bring resilience to the farm and the community?”
The model also offers ways to improve. Regrow Ag then sells all this information to clients such as general millswhich has pledged to advance regenerative agriculture on one million acres of farmland by 2030.
“We’re getting ingredients like oats for the Cheerios, and wheat for the Pillsbury, so we really source them from the Great Plains in the US and Canada. We’re getting our dairy from the Great Lakes, and so we really needed tools that were able to model the effects,” Steve said. Rosenzweig, President of Agriculture Sciences at General Mills, “On Agriculture in Those Places.”
Companies, such as General Mills, that pledge net-zero emissions buy the company’s software and offer it to farmers, as well as payments for ecosystem benefits. So, if a farmer changes practices on their farm in a way that helps sequester carbon or remove carbon from the atmosphere, they get paid for that carbon and Regrow Ag helps estimate that amount.
Regrow Ag is backed by Galvanize Climate Solutions and Main Sequence Ventures, Microsoftfor M12, Time Ventures, Rethink Impact, and Cargill. Funding to date has totaled about $60 million, according to the company Pitch book.
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