Technology for Carbon Sequestration - Part Two

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Yesterday we reported on the emergence of startup companies wanting to develop technologies to help farmers track and monetize the carbon they’re storing in soil. This begs the question, who pays for all of this technology to be implemented, and will the return on investment ultimately be worth it? Agtech investor Sarah Nolet of Tenacious Ventures says this is where food companies or even input companies will need to step in.

Nolet… “And I think that's actually where we'll see really interesting shifts like bundling of carbon or sustainability outcomes with inputs because input companies need to now play in this space and offer solutions or want to capture part of the stack here. Or we've got food companies that otherwise used to just run like a small pilot off here to the side, with some sustainability thing that they could put in their marketing. And instead are having to roll out large scale sensor networks to collect this data and actually pay for the adoption of that technology because they're the ones that need the information. So the farmers actually aren't incurring the costs and they're getting all the co-benefits of increasing soil health or water absorption or whatever it might be. I mean, that's another space where we think that having it be digitally native and managing those workflows with software is going to make a ton of sense.”

Nolet points to examples of companies from her portfolio like nori and Regrow as climate technologies that serve farmers.