🌱 Digging Deeper: Why Soil Health is Key for A&R – But Still a Hard Sell

Enhancing soil quality to protect and increase yields, water, nutrient loss, and carbon to drive farmer economics.

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🟫 Digging Into Soil Health

Beneath every field, forest, and pasture lies a critical and endangered asset: soil. It anchors our food system, filters our water, and holds significantly more carbon than all the world’s plants and atmosphere combined — an estimated 2,500 gigatonnes. Centuries of plowing, overgrazing, synthetic inputs, and land management practices have stripped away the organic matter and microbial life that make soil function effectively. Since humans began farming, over 133 gigatonnes of carbon have been lost from soils. In a world of rising heat and intensifying droughts and floods, rebuilding soil health isn’t just a land issue; it’s a frontline societal and climate solution.

🌍 Problems to Solve

The Scope of the Problem: Soil health is stuck in a commercial paradox: it’s proven agronomy, but not a proven business case for farmers. Globally, 33% of soils are already degraded, with 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil lost annually and billions in productivity wiped out each year. In the US, 39% of farmland (more than 50% of cropland) is rented so farmers are not directly incentivized to make long-term investments in soil health. As soils degrade, they lose the ability to hold water and nutrients, amplifying crop losses and releasing carbon once stored.

The Current Adaptation and Resilience Gap: Despite its foundational role in crop yield, soil health remains overlooked in climate adaptation and resilience strategies. Fewer than 5% of adaptation funds flow to agriculture, and within that, soil-specific interventions receive only a fraction. As a result, farmers often lack the financial incentives, data, and tools to invest in long-term soil regeneration. Without a shift in focus and funding, billions of acres of farmland will see accelerated soil loss and increased vulnerability to deluges and droughts.

📊 Demand Drivers

Demand Signals: Soil health is getting increased attention across agriculture, carbon markets, and policy, but actual adoption remains piecemeal and underfunded. Around 40% of US farmland now uses some form of conservation tillage, yet cover crops are planted on just 11% of farms. The practices that offer the biggest soil gains are often the least adopted. Farmers broadly recognize soil health’s importance, but hesitate without trusted technical guidance, short-term ROI, or bundled support systems.

We’re seeing growing pressure start across the value chain, not just from farmers, but from buyers and regulators, asking for measurable and scalable solutions that rebuild the ground beneath us. Key market trends and demand drivers we’re seeing include:

• Soil as an Economic Engine: In Germany alone, restoring soil organic matter could unlock over €14 billion annually in higher productivity, water savings, and emissions reduction, if builders are able to tap into this market opportunity.

• Farmers Under Pressure: For growers, soil health is less about abstract climate goals and more about managing volatility. Rising fertilizer costs, erratic weather, and tighter margins make soils that hold water and nutrients a survival tool. But adoption stalls when payoffs are slow.

• Patchy Practice Adoption: While conservation tillage is widespread, most farmers adopt only one or two practices, often missing the synergistic benefits of a full soil health stack — integrating cover crops, reduced tillage, diverse rotations, organic amendments, and biologicals.

• Corporate Signals: Multinational buyers like General Mills, PepsiCo, and Nestlé are incorporating soil health into regenerative sourcing standards to hit Scope 3 targets. Tying supply contracts to verifiable practices is a potential game-changer for uptake if financial pathways follow.

• Verification Bottlenecks: Confidence in soil carbon markets is growing, but is limited by expensive, complex, or inconsistent MRV tools in a complicated ecosystem like soil. New soil-sensing startups are racing to make field-level carbon traceable, affordable, and credible.

These trends signal an initial shift from soil health as a loose set of values to soil health as a functioning system, but widespread adoption is still far off and will depend on making the business case work at the field level.

Policy Tailwinds: Soil health is gaining ground in U.S. policy at the state level. California’s Healthy Soils Program, Washington’s Soil Health Initiative, and new legislation in Illinois are embedding soil into climate and ag policy, creating durable regional models for adoption. While at the federal level, the USDA’s $3.1B Climate-Smart Commodities initiative has been canceled and replaced by the Advancing Market for Producers Initiative - but it’s yet to be seen whether the previous program’s funding is safe under its new branding.

Industry Maturity: Soil health is caught between two worlds: agronomy and climate finance. The science is strong; we know that increasing organic matter (carbon), reducing tillage, planting cover crops, and fostering mycelium growth improve soils. However, scalable, investable platforms are still in what feels like beta testing. Market infrastructure is still fragmented, with biologicals, biochar, and carbon platforms all moving in parallel, not in sync.

Think early rooftop solar: everyone agreed it made sense, but adoption lagged until the tools, incentives, and turnkey installers showed up together.

A near-term opportunity is to build integrated soil health solutions, combining agronomic guidance, cost-sharing, yield drivers, and risk management into a single product that’s easy for growers to adopt, trust, and drive better crop revenues.

🚧 Challenges & Barriers

Despite growing interest and innovation, the adoption of soil health practices continues to face systemic headwinds. From economic risk to technical complexity, these barriers must be addressed to unlock meaningful scale.

• Slow Agronomic Payoff: Unlike fertilizer or pesticide applications, soil health improvements can take years to show measurable results. Many benefits, like increased organic matter or water retention, can take several years to decades to unfold, making it hard to align with short-term planning and financing cycles. We need solutions with clear ROIs for farmers within a few years.

• Upfront Cost and Yield Risk: Transitioning to soil health practices often means upfront costs for new equipment. With most US farmers in debt and roughly half reporting negative farm income, most can’t afford short-term financial loss and added yield risk. Could PPA (power purchase agreement) type models increase adoption by lowering the farmer’s risk level?

• Mixed Results: Soil health practices aren’t one-size-fits-all. In dry regions or degraded soils, cover crops can compete for water, and some biologicals may underperform. Getting results depends on local conditions — the right practice in the wrong place can do more harm than good.

• Fragility of Gains: Soil carbon gains are fragile and reversible. Without ongoing intervention, biological sequestration methods risk losing stored carbon quickly, calling permanence into question. This risk undermines both climate and agronomic continuity.

• Biased Advisory Channels: In the US, 48% of farmers rely on input distributors as their primary source of agronomic advice. These advisors are financially tied to selling seed, fertilizer, and chemicals, and rarely promote practices that reduce input use, like cover cropping or compost. This commercial bias limits exposure to regenerative strategies and slows behavior change at scale.

High‑Integrity MRV Required: Credible carbon abatement claims require accurate sampling at depth and long-term follow-up, but full soil-based MRV packages can be complex and resource-intensive.

🌐 Who’s Solving What Today?

A new wave of soil-focused innovation is gaining traction across biologicals, diagnostics, and waste-to-value systems. Shifting soil health from a conservation ideal to a measurable, monetizable strategy - we have to show economics to drive adoption. While the sector is still maturing, a growing toolkit of technologies and services is giving producers more precise, scalable ways to restore the ground beneath them.

• Next-Gen Soil Diagnostics: Rapid, low-cost soil carbon and microbial sensors are making field-level monitoring more accessible. Startups like Yard Stick are deploying in-field spectrometers to cut the cost and lag time of soil carbon measurement, while Biome Makers and Pattern Ag are mapping soil microbiomes to inform fertility and disease risk with DNA-level precision.

• Bio-Intensive Amendments: Microbial inoculants, fungal stimulants, and organic biostimulants are being used to improve root-zone health, nutrient cycling, and stress tolerance. Companies like Pivot Bio and Indigo Ag are engineering microbial solutions that boost nitrogen fixation and carbon sequestration while reducing synthetic inputs.

• Soil Carbon from Waste: The line between soil health, carbon storage, and waste management is blurring. Innovators like Applied Carbon are converting cover crop waste into biochar for long-term soil carbon storage and soil health, while Biochar Now is focused on producing industrial-grade biochar at commercial scale. UNDO won this year’s X Prize for their use of enhanced rock weathering for carbon removal and soil enhancement.

• MRV and Carbon Access Platforms: To unlock soil carbon markets, verification must be fast, credible, and cost-effective. Regrow and CIBO Technologies are building remote-sensing platforms to quantify practice changes and issue high-integrity credits, with some platforms offering bundled advisory and marketplace access to farmers.

• On-Farm Soil Health: Rather than selling single products, some startups are offering bundled soil health programs, integrating biologicals, compost, measurement tools, and regenerative practice coaching. Groups like Vayda, Regen Ag Lab, and Continuum Ag are helping farmers implement full-spectrum transitions with clear agronomic and financial support.

While the sector still suffers from fragmented standards and long biological timelines, these innovations are pushing soil health from belief to business case — bringing together agronomy, carbon, and data in ways that can scale.

🔭 TLDR: Where are the Conditions Ripe for Innovation?

GigaClimate’s POV: Soil health can shift from a regenerative buzzword to a backbone of climate-smart agriculture. For farmers, the question is whether soil health pays, and how soon. Most practices take years to show results, while growers need returns in the next season. The opportunity for builders is to close the gap: deliver faster-acting tools and design business models that make longer-term soil investments practical, profitable, and low-risk. We’re on the lookout for:

• Soil Solutions that Upgrade Crop Output: Build solutions that clearly add direct crop value within 5 years through increased yield, lower costs (e.g., insurance), and buffered variability

• Financing solutions: PPA-type business models that share risk and reward between farmers and financiers.

• Biochar at Scale: Deploying low-cost, high-carbon-yield biochar from agricultural waste streams to boost water retention, stabilize nutrients, and lock carbon in the soil for centuries.

• Microbial Consortia & Biostimulants: Engineering microbial blends that improve nutrient cycling, enhance root-microbe interactions, and increase soil carbon stability.

• Soil Fauna Activation: Stimulating soil ecosystem engineers like earthworms, fungi, and arthropods that build structure, aerate soils, and enhance biological resilience.

• Soil-Structure Enhancers: Innovating physical or mineral-based inputs (e.g., silicate clays, natural polymers) that improve aggregation, porosity, and water holding capacity.

The next wave of innovators won’t just sell inputs, they’ll reshape the economics of soil as a crucial long-term asset for the farmer and for the future of food security.

✅ Key Questions for Builders

Healthy soil isn’t just a climate solution; it’s the operating system of adaptive and resilient agriculture. It buffers against drought, boosts productivity, and stores carbon where it belongs. The next wave of soil innovation won’t just improve farm-level outcomes; it will treat soil as a systems lever, tying together productivity, water resilience, input efficiency, and long-term land value.

At GigaClimate, we’re looking for entrepreneurs and operators turning soil from a cost center into an economic and climate asset. If you're building technologies to directly improve soil health to unlock financial returns for farmers and unlock its widespread adoption, we want to hear from you.

As you build, here are the questions we think matter most:

• What direct interventions (microbial, mineral, mechanical, or biological) can reliably improve soil structure, function, and resilience across diverse conditions?

• How can you bundle agronomy, data, and financial tools into adoption-ready soil health platforms farmers will actually use?

• Can you make soil carbon gains visible and verifiable, without making measurement more expensive than the outcome?

• What will unlock scale: regional composting hubs, microbial production, delivery-as-a-service models, or something else?

• How do we build trust in the economic case for soil as a long-term climate and financial asset?

Stick with us as we dig deeper into this Adaptation and Resilience series. The next era of agriculture is being built from the ground up.