Agriculture and the entire food ecosystem account for approximately one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Growing crops is a dirty business, but new technology now offers farmers and big food companies a way to make it cleaner.
Growing amounts of all the food we eat deplete the soil of nutrients and generate harmful carbon emissions. Regenerative agriculture aims to reduce emissions and protect soils through various methods. These include crop rotation, cover crops, increasing biodiversity, composting and livestock integration. It also increasingly includes improving crop resilience to climate change.
An example is recycled silver, a start-up company focused on decarbonizing and renewing agriculture. It takes satellite imagery, weather data, government soil maps and field observations of specific farms and feeds it all into a computer model that understands how soil and crops behave under different conditions. Regrow also works with farm management partners including john deereimporting crop, yield and management data directly into its platform.
Co-founder and CEO Anastasia Volkova said: “We monitor 1.2 billion acres to see how agricultural practices are being adopted so we can inform the private and public sectors how Take action.” “Is it good for the environment, water, soil health? Is it sustainable? Does it bring resilience to farms and communities?”
The model also offers ways to improve it.Regrow then sells all this information to clients such as general millscommitting to advance regenerative agriculture on 1 million acres of farmland by 2030.
“We source oats for Cheerios, we source ingredients like wheat for Pillsbury, so we actually source our ingredients from the Great Plains in the US and Canada. We source our dairy from the Great Lakes region, so we really need tools that can model the impact,” General Mills director of agricultural science Steve Rosenzweig said:
Companies like General Mills that pledge net-zero emissions buy the company’s software and make it available to farmers, in addition to paying for ecosystem benefits. So if farmers change practices on their farms to help sequester carbon or remove it from the atmosphere, they get paid in carbon, and Regrow can help estimate that amount.
Regrow Ag acquires Galvanize Climate Solutions, Main Sequence Ventures, MicrosoftM12, Time Ventures, Rethink Impact and Cargill.Total funding to date is approximately $60 million, according to the company brochure.