FarmLab Thinks It Can Get 1m Farmers to Sequester 1bn Tonnes of CO2 by 2025. Here’s How

by Jack Ellis (Ag Funder News) ... He (FarmLab co-founder and CEO Sam Duncan) started FarmLab with co-founder and chief technology officer Shahriar Jamshidi in 2016 with the aim of making sampling on farms more efficient and wallet-friendly.

Back then, it was still a largely paper-based process, requiring agronomists to trek into fields to take samples, send them off to labs, then wait for the results to come back – all the while requiring them to have their own systems in place to remember precisely where each sample came from.

The FarmLab team built a mobile app that could automatically record where each sample was taken from. It also allowed agronomists to interact directly with sampling labs online, and have soil results sent straight back to them in-app.

FarmLab’s offering has evolved since then. Today, Duncan describes the startup as a “Xero for soil,” providing a digital account that allows farmers to manage their soil health — including water capacity and levels of nutrients and carbon — by storing test results, maps, and other relevant data in one place.

‘Xero for soil’

A key milestone came in 2018 when the team secured a A$1.1 million ($817,000) grant from the Australian government’s National Landcare Program to participate in its Soil Tech Project. Working with the University of Sydney, FarmLab has taken soil sample data gathered from individual locations through its agronomist app and mapped it out over whole farms and regions, generating insights into soil health across wide swathes of Australia’s farmland.

“That’s a fundamental thing for soil carbon,” Duncan says. “Unlike atmospheric carbon, where you can fly a weather balloon up into the air and just take a measure, soil needs a series of samples from specific locations in the paddock and specific techniques to map those [over a wider area.] We’re now able to accurately do that and we believe that can now be taken up by carbon credit markets. Our aim is to develop something that’s verifiable by buyers like the Australian government, or private markets like Nori.”

“These carbon markets are worth $45 billion globally, but there’s a clear lack of participation by farmers due to the cost involved to enter them,” he adds.

The second lever will seek to develop an accreditation scheme that will allow farmers to certify their produce as carbon-neutral or carbon-positive. This could be particularly helpful for smaller growers and graziers, giving them a way to benefit from carbon sequestration without incurring the typically high costs associated with soil sampling and other aspects of entering carbon credits programs.

However, such a scheme would need to be seen as rigorous and trustworthy to have any chance of success – which comes with tech challenges of its own, Duncan says.

The objective for the next 12 months is to work closely with farmers and agribusinesses to come up with a low-cost accounting method that can leverage the work done by FarmLab and the University of Sydney to help farmers demonstrate improvements in their carbon storage. READ MORE