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Loss of soil organic matter could be the most underestimated environmental crisis facing humanity
So says Victor Friedberg, Founder and President of FoodShot Global, and mentions that recently, there is a whole series of devastating evidence that suggests he was not using hyperbole.
The UN has warned that only about 60 crops remain in the earth’s soils. Plowing and over-tilling have increased erosion 10 to 100 times more than natural rates. Meanwhile, deforestation, overgrazing and pesticides are adding to this degradation.
It is not the most encouraging set of statistics, but the history of our soil does not necessarily have to have a tragic end. “Let’s not get there,” Friedberg says of that ending.
That is the mission that drives FoodShot Global, a collective of hedge funds, banks and foundations that have come together as an investment platform that wants to address critical issues in the food and agricultural systems.
Solutions to revitalize the world’s soil.
In 2018, FoodShot decided to tackle the soil problem by launching its Soil 3.0 challenge. Companies and entrepreneurs were invited to submit business, research and policy proposals for possible solutions to revitalize the world’s soil.
Most importantly, FoodShot wanted to find some stakeholder group companies whose solutions could work together, forming what the organization calls “a new ground operating system.”
As Friedberg explained, that framework will use technology, science and agricultural practices to help the agricultural and food industries better understand the state of the soil and, armed with that information, make better decisions about everything from cultivation and harvest to understanding the types of microbes that live in the soil to optimize crop yields.
Friedberg likens it to weather forecasting, which uses a combination of science and technology to collect data on air pressure, humidity levels, direct wind, and temperature, among other things.
From that data, we can make all kinds of predictions throughout our lives, from someone like me who decided to host an indoor party due to potential thunderstorms or to a QSR ordering system that can recommend hot soup to the customer on a cold afternoon.
We do not yet have such a data collection system for soil.
In fact, we don’t know much about it. We know that healthy soil is full of microbes, which interact with each other to do things like break down organic materials (such as dead plants and animals) and return nutrients to the soil.
However, Freidberg is not far off the mark when he quotes Leonardo DaVinci to describe the state of our relationship with the soil in the XNUMXst century:
“We know more about the movement of celestial bodies in the sky than about the ground underfoot.”
This is where the Soil 3.0 winners come in.
Trace Genomics, which collected the main investment, has a proprietary analysis engine that performs DNA extraction from the soil and then analyzes it to help farmers track soil health across multiple fields (or even farms) and manage risk. of illness. The company was founded in 2015 by Dr. Diane Wu and Dr. Poornima Parameswaran and is based in Silicon Valley.
FoodShot also awarded two GroundBreaker Award winners, each of whom receives $ 250,000.
Dr. Keith Paustian’s COMET system guides farmers and land managers through their farming practices to help them improve their sustainability practices.
“You are creating the first platform where you can put soil type data, climate data, decide which crops you want to grow, which rotations to grow them, and finally determine greenhouse gas emissions from those. options “
Meanwhile, Dr. Gerlinde De Deyn, who won the second prize of $ 250,000 for the Groundbreaker, is working on plant biodiversity and is creating what Friedberg calls “cutting edge technology” that will allow us to better understand the biodiversity of plants and the relationship between plants and microbes in the soil.
A final investment of $ 35,000 was awarded to Dr. Dorn Cox, whose mission is to democratize farm data through his OpenTEAM platform, so that it can be more easily shared between farmers and the broader agricultural industry.
The competition to save the planet’s soil
The three FoodShot winners will receive guidance, mentoring, and capacity building resources to achieve maximum impact and scale.
The winners will focus both on their individual work and what they can do together in terms of contributing to FoodShot’s vision for the farm operating system of the future.
Soil 3.0 is just the beginning of FoodShot Global’s ongoing challenge. Each year as it progresses, the platform will choose a food-related topic to address.
While it is not known which area the next challenge will focus on, the platform has already considered cities with food safety, alternative proteins and food as medicine as possible areas.
For now, the platform is centered on the ground. As Friedberg explains, FoodShot drew up those other themes and came to the following conclusion: “We won’t be able to do any of those things if we don’t repair our land.”