Soil Carbon

The challenge:

To improve measurement, modelling, interpretation and monitoring solutions to quantify carbon levels in soils, supported by verifiable carbon measurement protocols.

Problem statement:

Carbon is critical to soil function and productivity, and a main component of and contributor to healthy soil conditions. Agricultural practices and the resulting soil management play a crucial role in determining if carbon will remain within the soil or be released to the atmosphere. Measuring carbon in soils also presents an opportunity to assess the potential for carbon sequestration and to better understand the carbon cycle on farms. This will help farmers to transition to a regenerative agriculture model and improved practices. Farm-specific estimates of soil carbon empower farmers to make informed decisions to improve agronomic (soil) management. Yet measuring the amount of carbon in soil can be expensive and hard to access. We aim to equip our smallholder farmers with soil carbon information so we can help them to act in a climate-smart way, building resilience.

The innovations must have the potential to be applied in an efficient, cost-effective, practical and scalable manner, and applicable in the geographies in which our smallholder farmers are located. The innovation should be simple to use with robust features to prevent any human error and to allow people of all abilities to use it for measuring. While the data can be used to support our carbon accounting, we aim to understand smallholder soils better in order to improve yields and protect our farmers from climate impacts, through healthy, well-structured soils.

Potential solutions could include but are not limited to:

• On-farm solutions for measuring soil organic carbon concentration and bulk density
• Modelling carbon sequestration potential linked to specific land management practices
• Remote monitoring solutions to provide landscape-scale intelligence of farm practices and soil health
• Soil Health Intelligence including advanced soil analytics to provide biodiversity, nutrient, and microbial data to inform farm practices.
• Co-operative or share-scheme models working with communities of smallholders