Satellites are the new allies of sustainable agriculture. Why didn’t we think of this before?
A North American startup is turning satellites into allies of sustainable agriculture, by measuring the capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) by various crops. In practice, the developers of Perennial explain, agricultural producers have a door to enter the carbon credit market.
That is, food crops may receive financial resources from companies and corporations that seek means to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. A cheap and positive form of financing for the environment and the fight against climate change.
It turns out that, globally, the upper meter of the soil retains more than three times the amount of carbon currently dispersed in the atmosphere and, with proper land treatment, can suck even more: through sustainable agricultural practices, it is possible to sequester more carbon in the fields.
The initiative has extraordinary potential gains for the community. But why wasn’t it made possible before? Well, the story told by the team of this project refers to some steps and behaviors of professionals and companies that have a search for disruptive innovation in their routines.
In the case of Perennial, among the topics listed by the McKinsey Quarterly magazine on disruption, the most relevant was the routine methodical examination of three aspects: a problem to be solved, the technology available to solve it, and the possible formation of a business model that generates profit.
What of it? The process of verifying that a field has absorbed additional carbon is not easy: physical samples need to be collected regularly and sent to a laboratory for processing. A challenging logistics and pricing operation to the point of excluding agriculture from the carbon credit market.
The word challenge is a powerful trigger for disruptive ideas. And when the challenge meets young minds in a university setting, we have the ingredients for a lot of innovation.
Perennial’s current CEO and Chief Innovation Officer, Jack Roswell and David Schurman, respectively, met while studying at Brown University . Together with another engineering student, the Ukrainian Oleksiy Zhuk, they began to think of ways to solve the equation.
This led to the development of a new technology that uses multispectral satellite images, capable of measuring the light reflected from the Earth, with a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, capturing information invisible to the human eye.
Satellite images are fed into a machine learning algorithm, along with environmental data about the field in question (elevation and climate) to produce a measurement of the carbon content of the soil. With these references, when analyzing the spectrum of light reflected by the soil, it is possible to have a precise measurement of the carbon present.
But to advance the idea, it was necessary to place a bet and invest in its development. Another typical step is to generate innovation.
To train the algorithm accurately, the team collected thousands of soil samples, digging holes in fields across the United States to calibrate their models for different weather conditions and crop types. Thus, the team allowed the algorithm to remotely quantify carbon in the soil. The company sees this as a disruptive step towards unlocking the soil carbon market.
And the disruptive minds of this project continue to work. At the moment, the company is promoting the training of its algorithms in other countries and continents to adjust the design for new soil types.
Again, disruptive technologies are put at the disposal of the fight against climate change. And innovation is closing the missing link between agriculture and the carbon credit market, which could financially leverage increasingly sustainable forms of soil conservation and cultivation. Have you ever thought of this alliance between farmers and satellites as the key to a new way to finance and drive crops and pastures?
