Digging into Soil Carbon with Yard Stick
Chris Tolles is the CEO and Co-founder of Yard Stick PBC, which stands for Public Benefits Corporation. Yard Stick is aiming to be the measurement backbone for soil carbon. Their handheld hardware enables onsite measurement of soil carbon in agricultural fields, and their software package provides data and analytics that help stakeholders in a soil carbon project to measure and track progress. As Chris tells it, the Yard Stick co-founders got to know one another in the MCJ member community during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. MCJ is a proud multi-time investor in Yard Stick. Even so, we still learned a ton from Chris during this conversation.
Chris highlighted that while MRV technologies are often associated with carbon credit sales, the voluntary carbon market is just one avenue for soil carbon project development. Another that is seeing strong early traction is insetting, where food and agriculture companies are beginning to measure an attempt to reduce the carbon intensity of their own agricultural supply chains. They aren't selling credits; rather, they're starting to make progress on directly reducing the emissions of how their food is grown, which is great news. Chris charts his background and experience and then explains what soil carbon is and why it matters, helping to put the efforts that Yard Stick is making into the context of the broader global carbon cycle.
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Episode recorded on Oct 23, 2023 (Published on Nov 30, 2023)
In this episode, we cover:
[02:38]: Chris's background and pivoting from consumer products to climate
[08:43]: Origins of Yard Stick in the MCJ Community
[11:59]: How Chris and co-founders came to focus on soil organic carbon
[14:43]: Cristine Morgan's research background as Yard Stick CSO
[18:50]: Overview of soil organic carbon and key drivers of soil carbon stock losses
[27:46]: Issues with how claims have been measured historically
[33:39]: Why remote sensing technology is insufficient
[35:29]: Yard Stick's technology and approach
[42:50]: The company's business model
[46:00]: Addressing criticism of soil carbon and other nature-based solutions
[51:49]: Soil carbon support in Inflation Reduction Act and future policy
[56:00]: Yard Stick's $18 million grant from the USDA
[58:19]: Their recent $12M Series A round led by Toyota Ventures
[01:00:00]: Reckoning with racial injustice and land theft in agriculture
[01:02:04]: Encouraging climate companies to address complex social issues
Resources mentioned:
Source: Carbon Gap
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Cody Simms (00:00:00):
Today on My Climate Journey Startup Series, we have Chris Tolles, CEO, and co-founder of Yard Stick PBC, which stands for Public Benefits Corporation. Yard Stick is aiming to be the measurement backbone for soil carbon. Their handheld hardware enables onsite measurement of soil carbon in agricultural fields, and their software package provides data and analytics that help stakeholders in a soil carbon project to measure and track progress. As Chris tells it, the Yard Stick co-founders got to know one another in the MCJ member community during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. MCJ is a proud multi-time investor in Yard Stick. Even with all that, I still learned a ton from Chris during this conversation. When I think of MRV or measurement, reporting, and verification technologies, I tend to think of technology that helps to support carbon credit sales.
(00:01:05):
But as Chris explains, the voluntary carbon market is just one pathway for soil carbon project development. Another that is seeing strong early traction is insetting where food and agriculture companies are beginning to measure an attempt to reduce the carbon intensity of their own agricultural supply chains. They aren't selling credits, rather they're starting to make progress on directly reducing the emissions of how their food is grown, which is great news. Chris charts his background and experience and then explains what soil carbon is and why it matters, helping to put the efforts that Yard Stick is doing into the context of the broader global carbon cycle. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too. But before we start, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (00:01:59):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:01):
I'm Jason Jacobs. Welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (00:02:07):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:02:12):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Tolles (00:02:27):
Howdy. Thanks for having me.
Cody Simms (00:02:29):
Chris, I feel like this recording is a long time coming and I'm excited we are finally doing it. Boy, I have so many questions for you, so I'm excited to dive in. Maybe first of which is diving into your background, you have done lots of different things and soil organic carbon seems like a relatively recent one of those things. Maybe walk us through your history and how you ultimately came to focus on this problem.
Chris Tolles (00:02:56):
Yeah, it is a brand new thing for me, I have no background in any of this. My jam has been science commercialization for a while, but not because that's what I intended to do in life. I went to art school undergrad, I went to Rhode Island School of Design. I have a bachelor of fine arts degree in making furniture. But even then I knew, "Hey, I want to use design problem-solving to do better in the world. I started in humanitarian relief. I think I had a very naive, what's better than that, worldview. That was fine, but it didn't serve me very well in terms of accountability. A lot of awesome people trying to do great work there, but thankfully at the same time discovered this emerging social business, social enterprise movement that was basically saying, "Hey, could the tools of business be used to solve many of these same problems of fundamental human need, et cetera?"
(00:03:45):
I had a very early career experience where I was the first employee of a startup doing a solar cooker, not photovoltaic, but big paraboloid, take this much sunlight, put it into this much space, and things get hot. That was my first experience of science commercialization. That's really continued to be my jam. I realized I have a gift for taking things out of the lab and into the real world. My design worldview I think makes me an intuitive ethnographer. I like understanding other people and their needs. Even though I don't draw or use CAD, I still very much self-identify as a designer and at least the last few professional experiences in my life have all been around this theme of be the business guy. There's scientists of the world who do great work. How do we bring it to the real world of customers and markets and how can I be a partner for them to basically figure out how money works, I think to overgeneralize.
Cody Simms (00:04:41):
I know part of what you did early on was you worked at the growth and innovation consulting firm founded by Clayton Christensen of a Harvard Business School, The Innovator's Dilemma guy, I guess is how I think of him.
Chris Tolles (00:04:53):
Exactly. He was that guy and he was a guy. He was a remarkable human being. He co-founded the consultancy called Innosight here in Boston. That was immediately after business school. That first entrepreneurial experience taught me how important business is. We were all product people and that meant the product was really cool. There's this thing around a product called a business model which really matters, and I came to the conclusion, "Hey, if I want to have impact, I got to be as comfortable designing that as I am designing the thing." After my MBA, I joined Clay's firm and it was a great experience in terms of giving me exposure to how normal people think about the world. I was definitely in a design bubble prior. It was amazing in terms of content, it was all innovation and growth stuff, for big companies who classically can't do that very well. Culturally, it was a bummer.
(00:05:45):
I'm not a management consultant at heart, I want to do the thing, but the tragic part about consulting is you give other people advice and then they take it or don't. I kept being like, "Man, I think I could do that better myself." I left the firm to focus more on being a doer rather than a recommender towards others and haven't looked back since. I describe myself as a recovering management consultant and that the structured thinking part of what we did there is still very much part of my identity and my work style. But, man, is it great to know that when you conclude something, you can just decide to do it yourself, and that's been a much better fit for me since.
Cody Simms (00:06:21):
Then your first company that you started was in the food and drug space would be the right way to describe it? Boy, I'm sure you had quite a steep learning curve going to build that.
Chris Tolles (00:06:33):
Totally. Company is called Sundaily started as Sundots. We were threatened with a lawsuit by the owner of the Dots trademark, so I can go deep on trademark conflict and the existential uncertainty of renaming a company midstream. But that was in many ways the same exact story of Yard Stick in that it was science commercialization. In this case, it was a dermatology researcher from Harvard Medical School here in Boston, incredible woman named Emilia Javorsky, but it was totally different and that it was a consumer product, it was brand-led, it was subscription E-commerce, and much in the same way that the Yard Stick form. She was like, "Hey, here's literature, this totally works." The premise was an ingestible sun protection product. They were gummies, it's edible sunscreen, it's a pretty trippy plant compound called Polypodium leucotomos extract. Not trippy in the psychoactive sense, but trippy in the incredible sense.
(00:07:25):
She's like, "Hey, here's some literature. You eat this and it works like sunscreen." I was like, "That's nonsense, but I'll read the literature." Then I read the literature and it wasn't nonsense. I was like, "Holy moly, this is a game-changer." We don't have enough time for me to sit on the therapist's couch of everything that made Sundaily a painful company. Suffice to say a lot of it was, as you suspect, a steep learning curve to figure out how to run a company that's got a foot in dietary supplements, which is almost categorically a pretty bullshit market, and a foot in the beauty sector because the most passionate sun protection consumers in America are largely women buying in a skincare cosmetics beauty angle. It totally worked.
(00:07:59):
I sold the company in early 2020, but to this day, more than three years later, my kids take it. I'm bringing some to Hawaii tomorrow with my family. Didn't sell the company because I wasn't confident in the product. It's totally legit. It exists in this awkward nether realm of supplement drug interaction stuff but was a remarkable first founding CEO experience of just all the fundamentals of how to build a company. When I sold that company, I was like, "That was awesome." I never want to do another consumer product. But the parts that were awesome were this science commercialization premise.
Cody Simms (00:08:33):
You sold the company in 2020 and Yard Stick was founded in 2020, so you made a pretty quick personal pivot into a totally different space. What did that entail?
Chris Tolles (00:08:43):
Yeah. According to the state of Delaware, we were founded January 1st, 2021. Relationally, it started in 2020, much thanks to you and the broader MCJ squad. This is maybe June/July, and the acquisition of the company was a brand acquisition. They didn't want me. I'm a mediocre E-commerce entrepreneur. The acquirer Grove Collaborative online retailers for Whole Foods, they had plenty of those. My earn-out was pretty brief. I decided I definitely want to do that again, that being co-founding a company alongside a scientist, but I only want to look at climate. Summer 2020 was not a ideal networking phase, shall we say. Whereas I would normally be trying to buy postdocs a beer around Cambridge, instead I was like, "Uh-oh, I've got the internet, how can I use that instead?" So the MCJ Slack group was my hunting ground and I approached it in a pretty mercenary sense.
(00:09:36):
I wanted to start another company. So I was just looking for people who could be my counterpart and I found one, he is my now illustrious hardware co-founder Kevin, our CTO, and he had already built a relationship with Cristine Morgan, the lead scientist for all this work who has been toiling in the lab for pretty literally 15 years before we came along. MCJ summer 2020. I love working on meaningful things. Especially some of the existential angst of COVID like, "What am I doing? Am I contributing?" I was very happy to get back into a full-time experience.
Cody Simms (00:10:14):
I can definitely attest to in those lockdown months of 2020 when so much was going on in the MCJ Slack and I remember weekend meetups around different climate topics that we were all jumping onto Zooms for and whatnot, and you were there at every single one of them. You were so plugged into what was going on.
Chris Tolles (00:10:32):
I was. It's also a good fit for my personality. I love meeting other people, I love learning from other people. Some people don't like networking. I'm like, "I get it. You don't. I do. I call it making friends." This was just a great way to make a bunch of friends. Kevin and I met through MCJ, co-founder dated all fall. This effectively included co-founder dating with Cristine because she's the science, she's where it's all coming from. In fall 2020, we got a big ARPA-E award, the Department of Energy's R&D fund. That's really when it was like, "All right, there's a thing popping here." I had known Jason locally here in Boston. I had met some BEV people locally. So everything came together, fall, winter to form the company in January and then closed the pre-seed in February 21.
Cody Simms (00:11:15):
Which MCJ, of course, was excited to participate in. We're very grateful that you included us from the very beginning.
Chris Tolles (00:11:22):
Very much so and more than participate relationally, pull other people in. I have my relationship with lower carbon to thank MCJ for. That was a pretty remarkable few months of pulling it together and the sense that we were building a cool thing in the Boston area too. Despite the fact that we're a remote-first company and I'm the only one here. I love the always underdog vibe of Boston. I think we are higher performing per capita than the Bay. It was really neat to pull together [inaudible 00:11:50] and MCJ and BEV who have a very strong Boston premise to kick off the company in early '21.
Cody Simms (00:11:59):
With that, you obviously during this time of heavy exploration and whatnot, come into this thing like, "I'm going to build a company in soil organic carbon." You said, "I want to build a science-based company in climate change broadly." You could have gone so many different directions. How did the problem of soil organic carbon jump to the top of your list?
Chris Tolles (00:12:21):
I think there's three things. Is it an inspiring opportunity? The second is there chemistry with people. Because all this is people at the end of the day. Then the third is timing. On the first, Kevin and I both found this chart, which we can include in the show notes if you want. It's basically like the X axis is gigatons per year, removal potential, talking about CDR for a moment. The Y axis is cost. We want the bottom right, we want a lot, and we want it cheap. There's a box in the bottom right of this plot and it's labeled soil carbon. So Kevin and I both looked at that and we were like, "How do we get that box? That's the good box." Kevin being a wonderfully first principles guy was like, "I'm going to figure out what's holding that back." There are many things that are holding that back, but arguably a central, if not the central one of them is measurement.
(00:13:11):
That was the just is it big enough to matter perspective. Yes, is it three? Is it six? Who cares? It's big enough to matter. The second piece is chemistry. I love Kevin Meissner. He's a righteous dude. I really respect him, his classic complimentary skillsets. He's got prior co-founding experience. He co-founded Charm. He was at Planet Labs for 10 years. He was at SpaceX, he build anything. So he could really understand, "Oh, I'm not going to be the CEO, I don't want to do business things. I want to do engineering thing." Similarly, I know my way around a machine shop more so than the average "business guy," which I think is a good part of our friendship. But ultimately, we really understood what the other had to offer.
(00:13:51):
Then Cristine, I've met a lot of scientists in my life who want to contribute to company formation, form a company themselves, and ultimately, you're giving somebody your baby. That's a really, really hard scary thing to do. Cristine was very self-aware that we were going to form an organization that was going to advance it and we were going to advance it with her contribution, support, advisement, but she's a full-time research scientist and she doesn't want to be otherwise. There was a real remarkable triumvirate of Kevin, Cristine, and I. I think each looking at the other and be like, "I just met you. I don't know. What's the downside? Let's give it a try."
(00:14:31):
That third piece of timing, especially 2021, Indigo was blowing up. There was a lot of visibility around soil carbon just as an opportunity timing from a technological maturity perspective. Cristine, again, have been working on this for 15 years. This isn't, "Oh, she published a paper." Good science happens slowly, it's a body of evidence. She'd published many, many papers. The field of soil spectroscopy was its own thing, independent of her individual opinion, and she was at the right point in her career where she's remarkably successful and she's editor in chief of Geoderma, top soil science journal in the world. She's like, "Another paper is not going to get me excited." Papers are great. But she, I think rightly perceived the gap between doing great original science and then seeing things with real impact that make a difference in people's lives in the real world. And somehow I convinced her in fall of 2020 that I could help her bridge that gap. That was that third piece of timing. It was ready in a whole bunch of ways.
Cody Simms (00:15:30):
And Cristine's now gone on and she's now the chief scientific officer at the Soil Health Institute, I believe. Was she already in that role when you all started working on this?
Chris Tolles (00:15:40):
Yeah, maybe for a year or two. I don't remember exactly. It was relatively recent. She had done most of the prior academic research while at Texas A&M tenured again fancy, but that was a more recent career transition for her, and she's still the CSO at SHI, which has expanded dramatically under her leadership. Her research interests lie far beyond soil carbon measurement exclusively. We joke with some frequency that it's called the Soil Health Institute and not the soil carbon institute for a reason, but this aspect of measuring soil carbon with spectroscopy was one of her central research interests over the years.
Cody Simms (00:16:16):
Well, let's set the table a little bit on soil carbon. Some basic Googling before our conversation help me see that there's somewhere just under 3,000 gigatons of carbons stored in soils. We think none of these numbers are ever going to be exactly accurate, but somewhere in that ballpark, which is significantly more than in the atmosphere.
Chris Tolles (00:16:39):
Yeah, many times that. Thankfully, let's keep it that way.
Cody Simms (00:16:45):
It's also a drop in the bucket relative to carbon in the ocean, but in the ocean is mostly inorganic material as I understand it. Whereas in the soil, you have actual either living or recently deceased carbon material, which is I guess the definition of soil organic carbon. Is that correct?
Chris Tolles (00:17:02):
It basically means where does it come from? Does it come from an organic source or an inorganic source? Is it a compound that was previously the body of a worm or a plant? Or is it typically carbonates or bicarbonates in soil which are formed through chemical processes rather than biological processes?
Cody Simms (00:17:19):
Is the bulk of this in the soil due to photosynthesis? Plants absorbing CO2, pushing it down into the roots, and then the roots becoming the feedstock and food stuffs of these microorganisms and bugs and things like that and so the carbon just essentially stays in the soil as a result.
Chris Tolles (00:17:39):
Measuring back to the beginning of time. The short answer is, I don't know. I focus more on how stocks and flows change today. By definition, anything organic in nature is a product of an organic process. Whether it's a tree, a dinosaur a bazillion years ago, an earthworm yesterday, everything that's organic carbon in nature is somewhat connected to a biological cycle.
(00:18:00):
Today, certainly photosynthesis is one of the key carbon inputs to soil carbon stocks. Almost any plant in the world, there are non-photosynthetic plants I have learned, which are pretty wild, but almost any plant in the world consumes CO2 as part of photosynthesis. That's part of its food. When a plant sucks up CO2, it has its own biogeochemical process within its body, so to speak, and a portion of the sea of that CO2 ends up coming out through its roots, for example, what are called root exudates. It has many different interactions with other parts of the soil cycle, but certainly, CO2 in the air is the input piece. Then organic carbon compounds that are fixed in soils travel a bunch of different pathways between the air and the soil. Nonetheless, that's certainly where most of it starts for new flows into soil today.
Cody Simms (00:18:50):
Then in terms of where the challenges lie, I've read that somewhere... This is a very broad number here. Somewhere between 50 to 100 gigatons of carbon has been released from the soil into the atmosphere over the last 100, 150 years during the Industrial Revolution essentially. I presume that is mostly due to agriculture, which now covers somewhere around 10% of earth's land.
Chris Tolles (00:19:15):
Yeah. One thing to remember is that soils are deeply connected to row cropping contexts like corn and soy, ranching, grazing contexts, beef most visibly, but certainly any grazing animals, also produce, tomatoes have soil. Lastly, people forget that there are soils in forests. Of forest carbon stocks, most of it is actually soil. Yes, industrialized agriculture is rightly pointed to as one of the key human changes on earth that are releasing soil carbon stocks, but deforestation does that as well. Anytime there is soil present in an ecosystem, there are soil carbon stocks because all soils by definition have living matter, therefore, they have organic carbon cycles as part of their ecology. I will say that the broad strokes of like, "Hey, the things we've done in industrial agriculture are one of the most visible causes of soil carbon stock losses, especially in the US."
Cody Simms (00:20:13):
That makes sense because in prior episodes of the pod, we've talked about forestry and have discussed how forest carbon credits mostly are sold as avoidance credits today, which is trying to measure the amount of soil carbon that would be released where this tree to be cut down. I think that goes exactly with what you're saying there.
Chris Tolles (00:20:33):
Exactly. To be clear, our work so far has largely focused on agricultural context. Forestry has soils, and so it's absolutely in our ambition to activate it, but that largely in the past, the soil carbon stock of a forest system has been ignored because it's really hard to measure.
Cody Simms (00:20:52):
With the agricultural context column, I guess, of discussion here, and thanks for helping us to see the broader picture, but we're going to now narrow our focus into ag. What have been the primary practices or drivers that have contributed to lower amounts of soil carbon, and what are some of the practices and drivers that are currently being promoted as ways to increase soil carbon stocks?
Chris Tolles (00:21:21):
Certainly, most visibly, and understandable to nonsoil scientist is the premise of tillage. We've probably all seen the photo of a plow. You're mixing up the soil, you're turning it over. That has incredible value. That's why we do it so much. To be clear, it's really, really good at some important things. It helps aerate the soil, reduces compaction, it kills weeds. These are all good things. Unfortunately, it also turns the house upside down. If you imagine soil microbiology as like your house got turned upside down, you would be very unhappy. When you take organisms that would otherwise be happy, living 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters underground, and then you put them at the surface, they're like, "Hey, what the hell? This is a totally different place. I don't want to live here." So many of the processes, the microbiological ecologies of soil, which happen successfully underground, don't happen successfully when they're exposed to air and sunlight.
(00:22:14):
Decomposition of organic carbon compounds on the surface, which are then released as CO2 or other greenhouse gases is directly a product of tillage, which is not the boogeyman. This is the challenge. We've been doing all these things for good reason and we can't stop doing these things, generally speaking, without some cost or complexity to the system. Certainly, there's some controversy around the specifics of a causal relationship, but many people suspect that the same industrial agricultural boogeyman of over application of synthetic fertilizers, over application of pesticides and herbicides, soils are alive, and so it's hard to kill one thing without killing other things.
(00:22:54):
Those are maybe two great categories of things that they're confidently pointed to as a source of a reduction in stocks. As well as to be clear, things that humans don't do. One challenging feedback loop here is that as the planet warms on average, there's likely to be increased natural respiration of organic carbon stocks. You could say, "Hey, if it's anthropogenic in nature, it's our fault as well." But it's less directly a product of an agricultural management choice.
Cody Simms (00:23:21):
I would presume as well as the planet warms and there's more drought, there's challenges with... In some cases too much water, in some cases, too little water that also might kill whatever lives underground as well.
Chris Tolles (00:23:33):
Totally. Broadly speaking, too little water is a broader problem. Again, overgeneralization. But things don't live very well without water on earth, especially terrestrial things. Fish don't mind, but soil microbes have to be wet to do their thing. That's why a desert is often lighter colored. You'll have a lot less organic matter, a lot less organic activity, lower organic carbon content, and so oftentimes a pet peeve of mine is the regen ag. Let's look at these two farms side by side and the one on the left is brown and the one on the right is dark and thriving and green. A lot of times that just means that the one on the right is irrigated and the one on the left is not. It may have nothing to do with the fact that you till or you don't till. It might just be that you stole the water. That's where a lot of the complexity is introduced because we sometimes really understand what's causal and oftentimes we don't.
Cody Simms (00:24:25):
So as I understand Yard Stick's business to be, you almost don't care, is this farm doing till or no-till, are they doing biochar, are they doing some crazy new treatment that people want to experiment with. Your job is to measure if it's working or not.
Chris Tolles (00:24:43):
Exactly. Yeah. I think I would say in the short-term my business model doesn't care. I'm a measurement services company. It's really important to our scientific integrity that we get paid to measure things. People are always surprised. Offsets are one part of our business. There's lots on non-offset stuff we do, but nonetheless, offsets are part of our business. "Hey, why don't you just take a cut of that high-quality soil carbon offset that gets sold?" Imagine how that messes up the incentives. Who would ever trust my measurement technology if the way I made money was saying, "Yes, there's a whole bunch of tons here." So we get paid for measurement services.
(00:25:17):
I say I don't care in the sense that my business model doesn't in the short term and that if all we're measuring is unsuccessful projects, I'm bummed both from an impact perspective and frankly, I'm probably going to go out of business. Because eventually, people will be like, "Nope, soil carbon can't go the distance." You can argue that there's just a monitoring aspect to what we're doing, but it's certainly a lot more inspiring to think that we're an enabler of, "Wow, X does work. Y really can turn the trend around." That caveat aside, yeah, you're right. I don't care. Not my problem, it's my customer's problem. But when you're a business, your customer's problems are your problems.
Cody Simms (00:25:52):
Though it seems like some of the solutions, may be stop doing some of this, and some of those solutions, maybe start doing some of that. From that perspective, you don't have a dog in the fight, I guess.
Chris Tolles (00:26:04):
No. Oftentimes customers come to us with... These are usually called management plans or transition plans. Sometimes customers come to us with very credible plans and sometimes they come to us with cockamamie plans. We always want to be a friend and a partner, but we're sometimes like, "I don't know if that's going to work, but I'm going to get paid and ultimately my job is to help you understand, does that work or does that not that work?" I will say that within the domain of, hey, what could be different, what are the solutions, there are pretty clearly two buckets of solutions. The first, let's call management practices, and these are things that don't require "technology."
(00:26:42):
Hey, if tillage isn't that bad, let's do less of it or do less of it in the right circumstances with the right complimentary changes. If we are applying too much herbicide, let's do less. Intercropping, agroforestry, all this cool stuff, relatively low-tech. Second bucket, some of the literature calls like frontier technologies, which is Andes Bio, Loam Bio, Locus, even enhanced rock weathering if you've had Lithos and Undue or Ion on.
(00:27:09):
These are folks where there is more fundamental "tech risk" or science risk, and that means these are some folks that are coming to us and they're like, "Hey, I mean they're telling their VCs that it's going to work. Of course, they do. That's their job, yourself included perhaps. But we all know there's a lot of uncertainty." So our job is to help separate the wheat from the chaff, both when we're talking about the multivariate complexity of management practices and the more fundamental scientific uncertainty of some of these emergent technologies.
Cody Simms (00:27:39):
If Yard Stick didn't exist, how have these claims been measured historically?
Chris Tolles (00:27:46):
It's either done poorly or it's done very expensively. The spatial variability of soil carbon is a central challenge. Imagine a stadium filled with a zillion different permutations of people, every skin color, every eye color, every hair color, every height. You would have to grab a whole bunch of people in order to describe the population, the whole stadium. Now imagine a stadium that's only one skin color and only two eye colors. All of a sudden you're like, "Oh, phew. I don't have to grab so many people." Soil carbon is the former. There's insane spatial variability, and so you need a lot of samples to capture the variability to touch a lot of parts of the field. If each of those points is very expensive, which they are with conventional laboratory analysis and you're always budget-constrained, what are you going to do? You're just going to grab a few.
Cody Simms (00:28:34):
By samples you mean historically you're literally going and digging up core samples from the farm.
Chris Tolles (00:28:40):
Exactly. You're taking a stainless steel cylinder, maybe two inches in diameter, and you are slamming it into the ground, removing that soil, and sending it to the lab, which will then tell you something about that soil.
Yin Lu (00:28:51):
Hey, everyone, I'm Yin a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning, and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community.
(00:29:21):
A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early-stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly women climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early-stage founders, climate book club, our workshops, and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the Members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (00:29:51):
These are consultants that the farm has hired in order to be able to essentially be able to justify selling an offset of soil carbon that they are capturing on their farmland?
Chris Tolles (00:30:04):
Historically, soil carbon offsets have not existed. Most soil sampling has been for other purposes, namely crop nutrition. Sometimes farmers will sample their own land. More commonly though, it's your agronomist, it's the person who's going to be giving you advice about, for example, how much fertilizer to apply. They grab a few, they send it to the lab. The advent of soil carbon offsets as an opportunity have really changed the calculus on conventional samplings insufficiency. Because all of a sudden, you're very sensitive to that spatial variability.
Cody Simms (00:30:37):
Before it was, "Are my yields going to be correct? How much money am I spending on these inputs I'm going to put on my soil now?" Now it's, "Oh, I have another whole potential revenue stream for my farm that I want to manage."
Chris Tolles (00:30:50):
Exactly. Imagine the so what of high spatial variability, nitrogen sampling. If you don't have variable rate fertilizing equipment, it doesn't matter that you've got a much better sense of the spatial variability of nitrogen in your field. With all due respect to the remarkable farmers of the world, the detailed arithmetic between nitrogen values and nitrogen application is generous. It's a thing that has historically been considered a super cheap insurance policy, especially when it's cheap, loaded up. Who cares if you don't understand nitrogen values all that well, putting aside the question of whether nitrogen is even one thing, which it's not. It's not unknowable, but the way to use sampling to inform a sophisticated nitrogen application prescription is just not been a pain point historically.
Cody Simms (00:31:41):
We're talking about a product that honestly, for many, many years was about throwing truckloads of cow manure out onto the field. Getting super precise about that obviously hasn't been the thing that people have done until quite recently.
Chris Tolles (00:31:54):
Totally. If a thing is relatively cheap and psychologically the source of a lot of reassurance, who the hell are you to try and trim back on that? No, you don't. Whereas soil carbon offsets come around and now the burden of characterizing soil carbon stocks and changes precisely goes up dramatically for two reasons. Number one, the methodology prescribes it because you need to do good science for these to have any credibility in market in the phase, especially of a lot of the criticism of nature-based solutions of the past. Two, the absolute magnitude of change is very small. So if the change is small, your baseline and your remeasure period in the future need to be very precise. Otherwise, you literally can't see that small change, and that's really when the insufficiency has become ever more evident of conventional sample.
Cody Simms (00:32:43):
I want to dig into exactly what you just said, but before we do that, you had said expensively or poorly. The expensively is you got to send people out to the field, put these cores in, truck them to a lab, analyze them. It sounds like you've got to do a lot of it if you want to measure well. I would think Yard Stick still has a lot of that challenge except that you're getting data in real-time without having to send it off to a lab that we'll get there, I'm assuming. On the poorly side, is it just cut back on costs so you do fewer core samples?
Chris Tolles (00:33:12):
Yeah. If we agree that for this amount of land, you should take 100 samples to do it well, the way to do it well is unacceptably expensive. "All 100? Oof, maybe I invest in that for my dissertation." The way to do it poorly is if you're looking at that, you say like, "How about five?" The individual point data at each of those five points might be acceptable, but it doesn't describe the population. Remember, it's the population, it's the stadium that we're trying to describe.
Cody Simms (00:33:39):
What about solutions that are saying, "Oh, we'll use satellite imagery or we'll use drones to go figure this stuff out using some fancy imaging technologies"?
Chris Tolles (00:33:51):
Soil carbon is underground and satellites can't see underground. It's that basic. Anybody that's using remote sensing data for soil carbon will acknowledge that plain fact. Generally, what they'll say is that things that are observable above-ground are predictive of below-ground things. Let's use a better example of forestry. Trees are above-ground. Things above-ground can see them decently. If one can understand, for example, a biomass relationship between above-ground biomass and below-ground biomass, maybe you can actually predict how much wood is in there quite well. I'm not an expert, but I trust people who say that you can.
(00:34:30):
The predictive power of the thing you can observe, the above-ground tree, and the thing you can't observe, the below-ground biomass roots is strong. In soil carbon, we just don't have that relationship. Folks will use things like NDVI, which is like how much stuff is growing there, how green is that pixel? Is there a relationship between the amount of above-ground biological activity as represented by green leaves and below-ground soil carbon stocks? Of course. Is observing that detail sufficient to characterize it? No way. Often people look at modeling and remote sensing companies and they perceive them as our competitors and they're not. They know this problem as much as we do. They're our customers. They need us to calibrate their models. The point is not that it's impossible to model soil carbon stocks and changes. The point is it's impossible to do it well without high-quality ground truth data and that's what we produce.
Cody Simms (00:35:25):
Let's then describe what Yard Stick is.
Chris Tolles (00:35:29):
Yard Stick is insitu reflectance spectroscopy for soil carbon. So "insitu" means in field, on the farm, we walk around, we ATV around, and we can include a video of the probe in the show notes if you like. Reflectance means we are shining a light on the soil and then measuring how much light comes back. Then spectroscopy means the fancy video camera that does that measurement. In the video, you'll see it looks like a big-ass hand drill. As we drill into the soil, there is a sapphire lens at the tip of the probe, which is underground. It's recording a movie as it goes underground. In the video, it'll probably be our 45-centimeter embodiment. You see a movie of the soil profile for 45 centimeters. From that movie, we measure the same stuff that a lab does.
(00:36:17):
We just do it non-disruptively. We're not pulling soil out of the ground. You're not sending anything to a lab, which is why it's substantially cheaper. We do have to sample conventionally to train our spectroscopy. We are still taking conventional samples, but the point is like most machine learning approaches, you invest in training data so that you can then rely on that going forward. That's our fundamental piece of hardware. At the same time, we're building the software infrastructure that makes that information useful. Again, I can include a link to an example stock report, but our customers are not buying our spectrometers, they're buying measurement services, the hardware insitu spectroscopy makes it cheap and the software makes it authoritative, includes chain of custody, auditability, and that's the trust backbone, which is arguably as important as low cost.
Cody Simms (00:37:08):
You have a probe essentially that goes into the ground, shines some light around, looks at what's going on, takes video of it, that collects data, it's internet-connected, it shoots the data back up to your software package that provides a dashboard to the farm owner and presumably to any other participants that have economic skin in the game in that data and helps them normalize it both for that sample as well as understand it across the different samples you've taken on that farm.
Chris Tolles (00:37:41):
Exactly. Only asterisks are it doesn't have to be internet-connected in real time. Many of these remote ranches especially the Amazonian jungle don't have Wi-Fi. We can do all this work locally and then classically, the next time you hop on Wi-Fi, it'll sync to the cloud. The other is that our customer is more typically an intermediary, a project developer, a brand co-op rather than the farmer or rancher themselves. We don't sell directly to almost any land managers themselves because they only have an economic incentive to invest in soil carbon data if they've already committed to a program. Therefore, it's the program operator, the Indigos of the world, the Truterras of the world, the Organic Valley is a customer. I'm on land with Dairyman Cody who sells milk to Organic Valley, but it's really Organic Valley who's my paying customer.
Cody Simms (00:38:33):
Are they doing it for both the idea that they might be buying or selling a carbon offset around soil organic carbon? Or they might just be wanting to make claims about their own product in terms of its carbon intensity?
Chris Tolles (00:38:48):
Exactly. The premise of Yard Stick is this data is valuable for lots of different people, for lots of different reasons. Because Indigo is so visible, it's helpful for us to be able to explain our service in the context of offsets. But Organic Valley isn't selling offsets. Organic Valley is trying to decarbonize its own agricultural supply chain, which we want. All the criticisms of offsets offloading the burden are great criticisms. I still think they're important, but nonetheless, when we get to work with an Organic Valley who's like, "Holy moly, 85% of my emissions are scope three."
(00:39:21):
They realize, "I can incentivize work from home all day long and it won't move the needle. The only thing that matters is what's the carbon intensity of the milk I'm buying? That means I need to press down into my supply chain. Today, I have a quality and food safety requirement, and now I'm like, 'Hey, everybody, I'm going to need you to get religion around carbon intensity because that's the only way I, Organic Valley, am going to hit my typically SBT aligned net-zero goal.'"
Cody Simms (00:39:48):
In their mode, they're trying to measure the cropland that the cattle themselves are grazing on to understand the carbon intensity of the agricultural practices that the cattle feed is ultimately driving.
Chris Tolles (00:40:02):
Bingo. Yep. They follow the carbon through their supply chain, so you could call them an in insetter, folks also call this scope three work. In many ways, it's the exact same thing that an Indigo is doing. Just Indigo wants to sell offsets. Organic Valley, so to speak, wants to commission low-carbon intensity milk. That ton is unlikely to leave Organic Valley as an asset that sold to anybody else. As you point out, it also enables them to make claims in the future around carbon neutrality or reduction of emissions. That's a fraught world absolutely. But fundamentally, we love insetters because they're dealing with their own backyard, they're cleaning up their own trash, and that's a lot more inspiring than what offsets.
Cody Simms (00:40:42):
When you started the company, did you have any sense that this is how your market would develop in front of you?
Chris Tolles (00:40:48):
I was smart enough about some of the history of offset markets to know that they were pretty shaky, and many times when they look great, they're actually pretty shaky. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion from the beginning of the company that if high-quality offset markets continue to grow, great. It's our job to enable, especially in soil nature-based solutions that respond to the sins of the past. Within nature-based solutions broadly, all the other founders I work with are like, "Oh, yeah, all those articles are spot on. We're just trying to do it better." I love that. Yeah, do it better. Offsets have been really terrible in practice, and there's many people who compellingly argue that they're irredeemable. I respectfully disagree and I'm excited to see many people continue to push the envelope. If we can make them successful, hell yeah.
(00:41:37):
At the same time, to my prior point, when folks are looking at their own dairy supply chain and saying, "Man, I got to deal with my suppliers," that's a lot more inspiring. We've also found some interesting other markets come up. LAND Funds, for example, they're very quiet. They're not consumer-facing, but they're basically house flippers for soil. They buy crummy soils and regenerate them. So their business model is the appreciation of the real asset, the land that they bought. When you're a house flipper, you take pictures of the house before and after, and Yard Stick is the photographer, so to speak.
(00:42:13):
They're keen on voluntary carbon markets as a potential revenue stream, but that's not the core premise of the business. Then fourthly, the research community. So we signed an $11 million contract earlier this year with a university that's just doing a massive projects to understand, "Hey, how do we do low-carbon intensity beef?" Again, many people could say, "Beef is the problem? There's no such thing." I don't know, I'm too much with the blinders on capitalists to consider the more fundamental question, but anybody trying to make a crummy thing better is somebody I want to support. So we're really stoked to be a research tool in that effort.
Cody Simms (00:42:50):
From a business model perspective, you mentioned you're not selling the probes, you mentioned you are a software company. Describe how the business model works today?
Chris Tolles (00:43:00):
Yeah, we're a services company is I think the way I would generalize. We typically price on a per-acre basis. Our customers think in terms of per acre, that's their P&L, and it's nice when your business can work with theirs. Our customers are thinking, what's the value from an acre and what are the costs? We're part of the cost side of the equation. We can also price on a per-sample site basis, but it's just arithmetic to move between the two. What our customers are coming to us with is they're saying, "Here's a half a million acres, how do I get this done?"
(00:43:32):
We can embody that in a subscription business model if we want, but that's just really pricing and contracting jargon. What's important is that we're not selling spectrometers and we are boots on the ground. We have our own permanent field team here in the US, so we sell a measurement experience because that's what our customers want. They don't want to touch anything. They're just like, "I just need this thing done. Give me the numbers in a way I can trust." The best way to meet them there is to say, "Great, give me some field boundaries and I'll come back around when we've got that data to share."
Cody Simms (00:44:02):
How quickly does soil carbon move?
Chris Tolles (00:44:06):
Not quickly.
Cody Simms (00:44:07):
I was going to guess you're talking years for these projects to start to show signs of performance, I'm guessing.
Chris Tolles (00:44:14):
Yeah, most natural systems move slowly. That's how a lot of nature works. This is actually a central cultural conflict with a lot of the climate tech world, which I love, and the reality of earth's ecologies, which more VC does not make soil carbon change faster. Another software developer can't make it go faster. So there's a great tension between the moral and financial urgency of a lot of climate crisis thinking with soil's going to soil at its own pace.
(00:44:48):
Measure remeasure windows are measured on years, the short answer is, I don't know, three to five years. The more sophisticated answer is that your measurement remeasure window should really be a product of the magnitude of expected change. Imagine if something is changing very quickly, you can see it sooner. When your kid is four, you can measure them every two months and be like, "Wow, you're bigger." When your kid is 40, you're like, "I'll check in a few years." There is certainly theoretically the opportunity to measure soil carbon stock changes faster than that, but that's predicated on the success of a lot of these fancy carbon dust companies. Some of them will do it, but generally speaking, especially when you're looking at a change in management practice, a few years between measurement instances is reasonable.
Cody Simms (00:45:34):
Carbon dust companies meaning things like biochar, enhanced rock weathering, et cetera.
Chris Tolles (00:45:39):
Yeah, that's my perhaps unhelpful bucket for all the fancy things.
Cody Simms (00:45:44):
Which are promoting themselves as things that can speed this up.
Chris Tolles (00:45:47):
Exactly. Or maybe not even speed it up, but just make it more reliable. Maybe it's fine if some of these things go at the current pace, but wouldn't it be great if we had really scalable low-cost ways to just keep it going at the current pace?
Cody Simms (00:46:00):
One of the criticisms of soil carbon is the permanency of it, which is, "You could do all this stuff for five or six years, the land gets sold to someone else, they rip it up or till it or do whatever they do, and you've just destroyed all the progress that someone has essentially paid for," how do you reconcile that?
Chris Tolles (00:46:21):
There's two pieces. The first is to accept it as a statement of ecological fact. That's fine. That's not the basis on which soil carbon is going to compete, and I think a lot of soil and nature-based people get really tied up in that and they feel like they need to prove people wrong, and it's like, "No, you don't." Things compete on different axis. The second is like, "Okay, well granted, what do you do with it?" The first thing is, I won't hold you to your exact language, but the binary thinking that your own example just gave of like, "And then it's all undone," doesn't actually reflect the literature. There's not evidence that like, "A single moment of tillage will undo years of soil..." What if that's not actually true in such extreme terms as that? Nonetheless, it's mostly nonsoil scientists talking to each other about this stuff, so it's easy to generalize, and I don't shame you for it. That's number one.
(00:47:15):
The second is you what's not permanent? 1,000 years. The only thing that's permanent is actually forever. 1,000 years is not permanent. 1,001 years is longer than 1,000 years. Again, it's a false binary. False binaries are a product of a lot of systemic illness in culture like a lot of white supremacy thinking is about false binaries. The idea that there's durability and not is itself false. That said 20 years is a heck of a lot shorter than 1,000 years. I think I just value immediacy and accessibility and cost more highly in the immediate term than many people who have devoted their careers to famously DAC (Direct Air Capture). I love DAC. I hope DAC succeeds. Anybody who works on DAC knows that we won't have much of it for a decade or two, and that's fine.
(00:48:05):
That's the risk that they need to accept. I'm just willing to accept that I'm working on something which has the blessing of being doable now that leverages essentially unlimited free energy from the sun and has this challenge of like, "Is it going to stick around and how do we get it to stick around?" I also think that within, especially, the climate tech Twitter bubble, Frontier and Stripe dominate the conversation in ways that I don't fully understand. I don't think that they've really thought through the second-order effects of what I would call an over-rotation on durability. They're all lovely people and they have advanced the conversation around CDR masterfully. I so appreciate that. But right now there are no Bloomberg front page articles about DAC because it wasn't around 30 years ago. Of course, it's only nature-based solutions with lower durability that rightly so get a lot of this criticism.
(00:49:00):
I'm just focused on things that can conserve the biggest emitters of the world. If you're willing, I'd love to include this particular plot in the show notes. The X axis is total emissions, the Y axis is total corporate profit per ton of emissions. Then each point is an industry. The line starts in the top left and goes down to the right. In the bottom, there's a box. The box is labeled 85% of global emissions and 10% of corporate profits, and all of that is below $100 of total corporate profit per ton.
(00:49:33):
Folks are like, "Hey, why did Toyota lead the round?" That box is why. Because for all the incredibly important sector-leading conversation of a Stripe and a Frontier, it doesn't represent the actual carbon burden of the planet. The things we need to worry about are the bottom right, and the bottom right is best served by low cost, and at least for the next few decades, the only thing I can get excited about that's low cost is nature-based stuff that comes at the risk of lower durability. I absolutely accept it. I'm just trying to break down the false binary thinking of trees equals bad equals fire tomorrow, don't bother.
Cody Simms (00:50:12):
The big "aha" that I've had in this conversation personally, is that a big chunk of your customer base is not necessarily trying to create a financial transaction and sell an offset to someone else. It's a company who's trying to improve their own practices and thus is incentivized to not undo the work they've already done.
Chris Tolles (00:50:32):
Absolutely. Bubbles and echo chambers. The US, myself included, myself as offender number one, tends to be incredibly ignorant about the rest of the world. I would encourage anybody interested in this to Google CBAM, Cross Border Adjustment Mechanism. This is fascinating piece of legislation from European Commission that basically says, "If you want to sell into the EU, you do, there's a border tax on carbon." All of a sudden Organic Valley is like, "I sure want to sell some yogurts to French people. Oh, my gosh, I'm going to get hit with what fine?" I mean a fine tax. What tariff if I have high-carbon intensity compared to Argentinian yogurt or French yogurt? That's cool." That has nothing to do with offset markets per se. You could say it's adjacent, because it's using the tools of economics for climate change, but, man, that gets me excited and it doesn't really care about VCM.
Cody Simms (00:51:28):
All right. That is a perfect segue to my next question for you, which is policy. Soil carbon, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't a big part of this huge package of climate policy that came out over the last few years, Inflation Reduction ACT infrastructure.
Chris Tolles (00:51:45):
It was.
Cody Simms (00:51:46):
It was? Please educate me.
Chris Tolles (00:51:49):
IRA included maybe $20 billion for existing programs, which are typically called Conservation EQIP, E-Q-I-P and CRP. You can Google them. There's some very high-quality criticism of them in terms of their climate rigor, which is justified. All things should always be made better. But there was also $300 million in IRA for soil carbon research that flagged measurement as a challenge. USDA, NRCS hasn't explained how they intend to spend that. I think that's expected in Q4. It was a small piece of the puzzle, but the way you get IRA passed is get Republicans to at least not want to die on the hill of it. That means agriculture has got to be part of the conversation. Certainly, less visible, but it very much was there.
Cody Simms (00:52:32):
Not in the big tax credit sense of things, but in the funding for research and development sense of things.
Chris Tolles (00:52:39):
Yeah, absolutely. That's really important. There is no 45Q for soil right now. There's a great debate about whether there should be, this gets into DOE versus USDA, but you're absolutely right. There was nothing of that flavor in there.
Cody Simms (00:52:52):
Do you think there will be some climate farm bill type of thing in the future?
Chris Tolles (00:52:58):
I mean, you could argue every farm bill is a climate bill. It's just, is it paying attention to the problem or not? The farm bill just expired, so it's a five-year term. It's often not successfully renegotiated before the expiration of the prior one. So can they do an extension? I wasn't around for the negotiation of the last farm bill because I was worried about ingestible sun protection at the time, but woe to the founder that thinks that their community is representative of the whole. Nonetheless, holy moly, there is so much momentum as evidenced by IRA as evidenced by USDA climate-smart commodities.
(00:53:35):
What's going on here is a better negotiation of, frankly, the Republican interest in agriculture to be less screwed and connecting that to climate messages insofar as it's palatable. Back to Cristine Morgan and the Soil Health Institute. It may be more controversial to talk about CO2e or soil carbon stocks in Iowa, but it's not very controversial to talk about erosion and water infiltration.
(00:54:04):
So frankly, you can look at the soil health, soil carbon Venn diagram and be like, "They're not 100% overlapping." But they're a lot more overlapping than a lot of other issues where I want bipartisan support. That's why, God forbid, Trump gets elected, climate-smart commodities isn't going anywhere. That's just like government pork. That is government handouts. They're just handouts towards essentially climate research. You can read lots of high-quality criticism about how climate-smart commodities is just propping up big ag. I'm like, "Yep, I don't know. What do you want?" I've made my peace with that and that doesn't mean I've made my peace with it fully, but the way you get the agricultural lobby to recommend a program like climate-smart commodity is you make it fit with their existing worldview.
(00:54:51):
That's why you've got a DAC effort in Wyoming. It's just you got to make it in their economic interest. People can say that I lack the activist spirit that I've capitulated. They're probably right. But in some ways, these are the tools I know how to work with and I am thrilled that agricultural solutions to climate change can cross this divide. Because it's big. Actually, back to your point about why this, it's a really cool cultural political judo that soil carbon can do. That's important. That might not be important if your main job is to operate a spreadsheet that balances durability of soil versus DAC.
(00:55:30):
That's important in the real world, especially the real world of America, and I love that we can be a company that is exclusively focused on climate as our mission and we can hang in a lot of agricultural contexts that many other climate companies I think would struggle to be a part of productively.
Cody Simms (00:55:49):
On the note of working with the government, you all recently were selected for a significant USDA award. Maybe share a little bit about that.
Chris Tolles (00:56:00):
Unbelievably, it was not recently, it was almost a year ago. But that's the speed that the government works at. That's the program I just mentioned, climate-smart commodities. Essentially, this is $3.1 billion of taxpayer money, that's important, to say, "Hey, commodities are the bulk of our emissions and the bulk of our agricultural economy, bulk of our ag emissions and ag economy. Let's start there." USDA said, "Gigantic pot of money. Bring me essentially research proposals for how you expect to demonstrate the opportunity of low-carbon commodities, carbon-intensity reduced grams per bushel, grams per liter of milk, whatever it is."
(00:56:38):
There were 141 programs awarded. Half of those are big programs. We have seven awards across the whole cohort, more than any other measurement company, which I'm proud of. Our job across all of them is the same measure soil carbon. Back to your point about we don't care, there is sustainable aviation fuel in there, there's biodiesel, there's agroforestry, there's novel grazing practices for beef. There's all these different projects. What they have in common is they got to measure soil carbon in order to do the total climate math of the project and it's USDA foot in the bill, but it's revenue for us.
(00:57:13):
That's real revenue. As an investor, you may not recognize it as a dollar for dollar because it's artificial revenue, but pay is my salary. We are thrilled to be out in front of that. We're thrilled for the visibility it gives us within USDA. I was on a call with Robert Bonnie, the undersecretary who led climate-smart commodities the other day. I was like, "Hi, I work at Yard Sick." He was like, "I know who you are." I was like, "Yeah, baby, we're doing something right." Because that's what we want to work in. We want to work within the agricultural establishment, warts and all, and USDA, NRCS, as well as Department of Energy because that's really where the company started are really important partners and I think bode well for our ability to click into regulatory opportunities globally as well.
Cody Simms (00:57:57):
It was somewhere around $18 million that will sees way to Yard Stick?
Chris Tolles (00:58:00):
Exactly. By the time, it was negotiated, it was 16 because everybody got a little haircut, but that was also only of the first six awards that got announced. We've picked up a few more since then from projects that didn't scope in a measurement services provider or unhappy with the one they did, so it'll be more than that. But call it 16, 18.
Cody Simms (00:58:19):
Then other funding so far, you've recently announced your Series A round of venture funding that Toyota Ventures led. Congratulations.
Chris Tolles (00:58:27):
Thank you. That's been awesome. We raised pre-seed and a seed in 2021, so this is our first money since then. By the time this episode airs, I think it'll be announced that it's $12 million total instead of the 10.6 we announced in August. It's just a super cool group of folks. Toyota represents the hard-to-decarbonize bottom right of this chart, I hope we can post. Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund represents the top left of that. To their credit, for all their participation in Frontier, when you look at the bulk of Microsoft's buying, it's nature-based stuff because they've got a blended talent, average price that they got to hit and you can't hit it without nature-based.
(00:59:02):
They look at the market, and they're like, "Wow, soil is kind of shitty. I sure wish there were better measurement." We're like, "Hi, here we are." That was thrilling that we could get them involved in the round. Lowercarbon, BEV, lots of awesome existing investors. The Nature Conservancy is a big win for us. Really, really proud. We basically want to show, again, the breadth of interest, like, "Look how many different people believe that soil carbon data is essential to whatever it is you care about in climate, decarbonization of agriculture, high-quality offsets, the ability to use markets to incentivize conservation and nature restoration." That was a super thrilling, super scary. Q2 '23 was a quarter, but we feel so encouraged by the awesome folks around the table.
Cody Simms (00:59:50):
Well, Chris, we have covered so much. You've been an awesome guest. I've really enjoyed this conversation. What else should we have talked about?
Chris Tolles (01:00:00):
I think there's a open question rather than a solution, but one that I think it's important to reckon within climate more generally, which is especially in agriculture, a racial and a land theft dimension to what's going on and has gone on. I bring that up not because I know what Yard Stick should do there, but all of agriculture in America is predicated on land theft. So where we're just operating in a system that's pretty morally compromised from the start. At Yard Stick, I focus mostly on my own personal transformation in terms of racial awareness and a justice orientation rather than, "this is how it shows up in our product."
(01:00:41):
I think that's appropriate because I think especially a lot of white men jump right to like, "Here's how I'm fixing the problem, just like I'm fixing every other problem by myself." We're also not in community with many farmers, ranchers of colors, or Indigenous folks. I think it would be foolish for us to say that we really know what solutions are, but the better all climate companies can reckon with the risk of climate solutions reinforcing unjust systems at the very least is just table stakes to see that's a thing that could happen and will happen unless we pay attention to it. Particularly, I think anybody in your audience who's keen to think about how companies in climate can do this better, both in terms of company operations, like how we behave internally and company offering, like how we show up externally, that's something I'm especially keen to build community around.
(01:01:35):
Because I think there's a lot of defacto liberal political persuasion within climate that's a good thing to think about. But understandably, a lot of fear, especially on the part of white men who lead companies to be like, "I'm smart enough to know I should be thinking about this, but not so smart to know what's going on." So I'm really eager to be in conversation with others that at the very least, again, want to acknowledge that those are the facts and find a way through it together.
Cody Simms (01:02:04):
Thank you for sharing all that. Gosh, what a big topic that we could surely been multiple episodes on just diving into. I'm glad you surfaced it. I think it's a good thing for us to maybe leave the episode on just for people to reflect on themselves as well as they go think about eating their next meal or going to the grocery store and finding where their food might come from.
Chris Tolles (01:02:25):
It always comes from somewhere.
Cody Simms (01:02:28):
Chris, I appreciate you. Thanks for all that you're doing.
Chris Tolles (01:02:30):
Thanks so much. Appreciate being on.
Jason Jacobs (01:02:32):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (01:02:36):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (01:02:46):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. If you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter at mcjpod.
Yin Lu (01:02:59):
For weekly climate op-eds, jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ venture funds, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Cody Simms (01:03:08):
Thanks. See you next episode.
