Soilify

Soil degradation exacerbates climate change and poverty alike: Poor soils release more carbon into the atmosphere while long-term yields are sinking. Regenerative agriculture is turning this around: It promotes ways to capture carbon into soils and increasing its fertility for better and healthier yields. Regenerative agriculture is that part of the circular carbon economy where carbon does good. Yet, it needs capital to grow - and capital that is deployed to grow better soils needs metrics that can document its impact. 

Soilify is linking smallholder farmers in South Asia to carbon certificate buyers and social and green impact bond investors. Its technical core is a satellite-data driven application that measures soil organic carbon on field level. 

Soilify is jointly run by Earth Analytics India, a satellite data analytics company, and Alsisar Impact, an impact investment advisory firm - both with a footprint in South Asia. 

Land use accounts for over 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, hence poor soils actually emit Co2. But degraded soils also exacerbate the impacts of climate change: water is not sinking in but running off, turning even lighter monsoon rains into a calamity for crops. 

Soil degradation is a global problem: 33% of the Earth's soils are already degraded and over 90% could become degraded by 2050, the FAO warned last decade. 

Wherever it is, farmers will be reluctant to change the practices of field preparation that they have applied over generations, despite the damage that residue burning or tillage is doing to fields in the long run. 

Changing practices needs substantial agricultural extension work but also funding to bridge the gap for the income shortfall that farmers may incur in the short-term due to their switch of practices.

Funding for soil-enriching activities requires robust metrics that verify the improvement. These metrics need to be precise enough to work on a field level but also scalable to be economic across very large geographies.

Soilify is a technology-enabled broker to crowd in capital to sequester carbon into soils and measure it. 

The core technology is a satellite data-driven algorithm that is build by Soilify partner Earth Analytics India to detect and quantify soil organic carbon at the level of smallholder farmer fields. 

The technology is based on multi-spectral satellite data from Sentinel 2 and other sources (digital elevation model, soil type, rainfall) alongside machine learning algorithms in R language that drive the algorithm. 

The technology is also the backbone metrics to measure soil carbon increases so that efforts in regenerative farming can be rewarded through either the generation of Voluntary Emission Reductions (VERs) or the implementation of outcome-based financing tools like social/green development bonds. 

For that purpose, we are leveraging the investment structuring advice of Alsisar Impact to catalyse impact-bond type capital to be deployed to FPOs and NGOs in South Asia that are engaged in soil-enriching regenerative agriculture. 

Ravinder Singh is a farmer from Rajgarh, a village in Haryana. He is leading a small farmer producing organisation (FPO) that is engaged in traditional farming practices and he is an agronomist himself. In India's central plains, rice is the main crop during the monsoon (Kharif) season while wheat is most sown as winter crop. To quickly switch between them, the residues are burnt, leading to air pollution and eroded soils.  

Mr Singh, who is also a freelance consultant for the Soilify project, is engaging his farmers to apply practices that increase soil organic carbon (SOC). His focus is not to mitigate climate change but to make soils more fertile in order to produce higher yields and more resilient in order to better resist flood damages. 

Similar to Mr Singh, we are also engaging with the Foundation of Ecological Security in the Indian state of Gujarat and are working with Partners in Prosperity in Uttarakhand, a hilly state in northeastern India. We are in talks with close to a dozen other organisations, also in neighbouring countries that seek to improve their soils. Some of the partners take part in government- or donor-funded soil enrichment programmes others start those initiatives on their own.

We help them in two ways:

1. We measure the impact across their soil enriching interventions in a scalable manner so that the organisations running those programmes can evaluate and document their impact without having to take expensive soil samples and take them to the field or deploy ground sensors.
2. We link them to finance through

• either carbon project developers with whom we are evaluating the generation of so-called Voluntary Emission Reductions (VERs),  certificates that can be traded on the voluntary carbon markets and if we find a buyer for them that can compensate the farmer for the risk he or she took in changing cultivation practices, 
• or social/green development impact bond investors that provide financial incentives to farmers for the implementation of conservation practices that generate positive environmental outcomes such as water quality improvement and carbon sequestration.

We support FPO and NGO partner organisations that are practicing regenerative agriculture in South Asia...

....with better data to guide their work and 

....with access to finance. 

As such, we work as an aggregator for local projects in enabling access to capital to implement regenerative agriculture, but we also provide scalable and verifiable monitoring and data collection to track ecosystem conditions.

Our tool Soilify provides the underlying metrics to measure and verify soil carbon regeneration. The Soilify Partnership is the platform we are building to aggregate farmer collectives and link them to capital that is de-risking their work.

We combine an understanding of impact bond structuring by Alsisar Impact with the ability to develop metrics to measure actual soil organic carbon on field level based on satellite data from Earth Analytics India (EAI). 

At Earth Analytics India Pvt Ltd, we are reasonably advanced in developing a method to quantify soil organic carbon content on field level based on satellite data. We go beyond existing initiatives (eg funded by BMGF in Africa). We are currently implementing and adapting our algorithm with FPOs and NGOs in India and Pakistan that work on soil-enriching strategies. 

Alsisar Impact in Mumbai and Delhi with experience in structuring social impact bonds for many years. We have worked closely with Lemelson Foundation for India's first Masala Bond structure in healthcare and have advised IDH Farm fit for their structuring options in deploying catalytic capital for small farmholders in India, to name a few examples.  

As a catalyst for regenerative agriculture, we address both the metrics to measure and monitor land and soil changes as well as the funding to foster a lasting transition of the agricultural system. One does not work without the other.

For the metrics, we managed to calibrate satellite data to be able to monitor soil properties at smallholder field level, going beyond approaches funded by the FAO or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (applied in Africa).

For the funding, we are advancing on two avenues: 

• generation of a carbon certificate by a farmer producing organisation or NGO on behalf of its farming constituency, or
• Galvanising funding through a social/green impact development bond that could be backed by Foundations with risk capital provided by Impact Funds or local/international Banks (eg we would qualify for Kering/TNC Regenerative Agriculture Fund).

We are in talks for the carbon certificate generation with leading carbon project developers in Switzerland with whom we are exploring the suitability of soil carbon sequestration as a source for VERs (voluntary emission reductions) from a climate market standpoint. We are planning to propose individual projects from India to interested clients to purchase VER in 2022.

Our innovation is the technology but also the ability to aggregate initiatives that work on regenerative agriculture and catalyse finance for them. 

Current number of farmer fields being observed 1000 farmers across two NGO/FPOs

Target number of farmer fields observed in one year: at least 10,000 farmers across five NGOs/FPOs

Target number of farmer fields observed in 5 years: Above 0.5m across 10 FPPs/NGOs in three countries.

Current number of NGO/FPO partners capacitated to obtain funding from either a carbon certification or social/green impact bond: 0

Target number of NGOs/FPOs partners capacitated to obtain funding from either a carbon certification or social/green impact bond: 2

Target number of NGOs/FPOs partners capacitated to obtain funding from either a carbon certification or social/green impact bond: 5

Goal 1: Development of an open-source satellite-based monitoring and evaluation system for soil organic carbon content on field level.

Goal 2: Application of the open-source satellite monitoring and evaluation system. 

Goal 3: Identify practical pathways to reward farmers for improving carbon sequestration in soil. 

Full-time technical team: 3

Part-time technical team: 1

Full-time Market linkage: 2

Part-time market linkage: 1

Directors: 2

With two young companies standing behind Soilify, EAI and Alsisar, we combine expertise in agronomy, remote sensing, rural technology, carbon markets and impact investment - hence touching on most areas of the carbon commodity reverse value chain.

Earth Analytics India spun off from an international public private partnership with SwissRe, IRRI and others on the use of satellite-data to de-risking agriculture (RIICE), the first initiative to provide continuous crop monitoring over Asia's rice fields.

The team leaders both have a previous corporate career with Michael pioneering the early bold climate change action of Allianz group, one of the worlds largest insurers and asset managers as well as setting up the company's microinsurance business in India and beyond, working with Care International and other NGOs to assess their risks and develop insurance risk protection solutions for them. 

Anuj has changed his work in corporate M&A to help social impact funds to find traction in India and is incubating various social impact start-ups. Anuj has extensively worked with leading agri startups such as Agrostar, Sammunati, S4S Technologies and others.

Our team members are based across India, Southeast Asia and Europe (with the focus on India) and we are also collaborating with Endeva, a think-and-do-tank from Berlin in exploring ways to work with carbon markets. 

We are an equal opportunity employer and are seeking talent from diverse background - be it with regards to gender, age, ethnic or caste background or level of experience. We believe that technology can deliver best results when it is co-designed with its users. This is why we also seek participation of active farmers in team leadership sessions. 

Our diversity approach is also reflected in the areas of operation that we choose. Within India, for example, we seek business in the marginalised geographies that might have lower private paying capabilities in the long-run but where technology can have a stronger impact compared to regions where use of technology is already higher. 

As a mission-driven business to de-risk agriculture, we put an emphasis on listening to the communities we serve.

In delivering our products, we take guidance from the Digital Principle for Development.

For Soilify to be successful in catalysing funding to de-risking South Asia's transition to regenerative agriculture, we need partners. 

We hope to find the partners in the Solver network both downstream as well as upstream our value chain - that is with regards to NGOs/FPOs and initiatives that are engaged in stopping soil degradation and are seeking to better measure it as well as funders that are looking into either carbon credit purchase or blended finance solutions to support regenerative agriculture in our geographies.

Given the novelty of the idea, its technical parameters and its financing tools, we will also need a lot of advice. This relates to the digital detection of soil parameters through satellites but all the more so to the mechanisms of the voluntary carbon market and the eligibility of our approach in generating Voluntary Emission Reductions. 

For our goal to use Soilify technology as a metric in a social and green development impact bond, we need to embed ourselves even more strongly in the respective blended finance communities for which this programme would be a very helpful platform.

We are a partnership of two younger organisations (Earth Analytics India and Alsisar Impact). Combined we have a good expertise on the technology that serves our purpose. But we need to strengthen our Human Capital - both with regards to specialised staff (notably on carbon markets and soil subject matter experts) but also with regards to the development of a diverse board.

On legal and regulatory matters, we have a good grip on the requirements in South Asia, but the carbon market has its own regulation that is following the international climate change negotiations. We can rely on partners here (like the carbon market developers) but eventually will need to in-source this knowledge.

While we have a good database of potential users of our technology (though we work on this to grow further), we need to help our users to find buyers for the carbon certificates that they will generate. Again, we would rely on carbon project developers here, but want to establish a direct client relationship ourselves also.

From the broader Solve community, the following introductions would advance our cause:

Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research to understand which projects they have funded related to our topic of interest;

The Nature Conservancy to apply Soilify in one of their soil enrichment project (one is in Northern India also) and to seek their advise on carbon market linkages or green development bond linkages;

Olam International as a potential partner (or client) for carbon credits at a later stage. 

Refugees have to cut their ties to the land that has been the centre of their lives and to the soils that they have worked and lived on. 

Citizenship bearers are either defined as decendants of the soil ("ius solis") or decendants by ethnicity ("ius sanguinis"). But it could also be awarded by a commitment to the values of the respective country and a comittment to increase the wealth of that country - in figurative terms: it is not the soil that is left behind but the new soil that a refugees stands upon and commits to turn into fertile ground that is including a new citizen. 

Our business model does not provide a direct point to integrate refugees, let alone those that the Andan Foundation supports. But the values that are close to Andan are also the values that drive Soilify: Resilience and Regeneration.

Implementing Soilify across its value chain will eventually require a robust cloud-based platform that works on a GIS-interface with access to different user groups of the soil carbon value chain. 

While we have the release of that platform implemented, its use for soil monitoring (currently only for crop) will require much programming and also user studies. 

A seamless integration and visualisation of soil carbon change (the core indicator of regenerative agriculture around soils) and the ensuing financial transaction is important for Soilify post-POC.

Eventually, we will seek venture funds to be able to finance the set-up of such a platform but this will only happen once we have gained some more traction on Soilify and its linkage to carbon market. 

We would use the grant by ServiceNow towards building that platform.

Eventually, the commercial application of ServiceNow could also be relevant to document a long delivery chain that involves different actors both downstream (FPOs) and upstream (carbon certificate buyers). While it is often suggested to make use of blockchain for that, its negative carbon footprint is somewhat counter-intuitive for our application that seeks to mitigate climate change. 

As an mission-driven enterprise, the use of AI to monitor, report and verify soil properties is at the heart of our operations. While our application is more focussed on nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change, humanity at large stands to benefit if regenerative agriculture can be implemented at scale.

We would use the prize to sharpen our profile - through issuing a white paper, holding a few events and galvanizing stakeholders on all ends of our value chain.