How OneSoil Is Helping to Combat Climate Change

This article is inspired by Slava Mazai's recent column for AgFunder.

Scholars urge technological innovation to play a major role in adapting farming to an increasingly warmer world. Precision agriculture offers a way to address this challenge. According to a World Economic Forum report, if 15−25% of farms adopt precision agriculture by 2030, the production and environmental effects could be significant. 10−15% more crops would be produced, and 10% fewer greenhouse gases would be emitted.

OneSoil, an affordable precision farming tool, strives to be a part of this solution. In this blog, we'll lay out how OneSoil can help address key environmental challenges associated with climate change.

The use of nitrogen fertilizer in agriculture has skyrocketed by a startling 800% over the last 50 years. This has contributed to drastically increasing crop yields. However, on the downside, it has led to tremendous growth in nitrous oxide (N2O) emission, a greenhouse gas that is almost 300 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Moreover, when used excessively, nitrogen fertilizer can seep through the soil into the groundwater and other water sources, leading to contamination.

Today, the expansion of farming lands comes mainly at the expense of the tropical forests cut down to make way. This process undermines the planet's ability to cool itself and releases tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). The expansion of agriculture into the tropics is responsible for 98% of total CO2 emissions from land clearing.

Given the tremendous impact agricultural expansion is having on habitats, biodiversity, and climate, clearing new land for farming is not an option when we try to feed the world's growing population. To feed a projected 9.8 billion people in 2050, farmers will have to produce an estimated 70% more food than they currently grow. In fact, future growth in food production should come from higher yields and increased cropping intensity on existing farmland, not from acquiring new land.

OneSoil's solution. Using vegetation data for previous years and machine learning algorithms, our free OneSoil web app is trained to identify productivity zones across a field. These are field areas with different soil fertility and yield history. One of our experiments showed that these differences could reach as high as 400%! By defining productivity zones, OneSoil helps farmers quickly and easily identify problem areas within the field to eliminate the causes behind poor harvests and to improve soil fertility.

Soil degradation accelerates climate change, thus driving up greenhouse gas emissions. Because soil holds up three times more carbon than the atmosphere, it acts as a carbon sink. When soil gets disturbed, soil carbon is released into the atmosphere, along with nitrous oxide.

The other side of the coin is that we have actually already lost nearly 33% of the world's arable lands and risk losing the rest in the next 60 years if current rates of soil degradation continue. Soil exhaustion, combined with the fact that we can't afford any further expansion of arable land, is a formidable challenge for farmers.

As the planet warms, it's becoming more challenging for farmers to grow traditional crops in a hotter climate prone to extreme weather events. A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that wheat and maize — two of the planet's three crops that provide 40% of the world's daily calories — are already suffering reduced yields due to climate change. The US National Academy of Sciences predicts that, with each degree Celsius of global temperature increase, there will be a 5 to 15% decrease in overall crop production.

Apart from extreme events, such as storms, droughts, and wildfires, even slight changes in heat and precipitation patterns can hamper plant development but assist in the spread of weeds, pests, and diseases.

OneSoil's solution. Growing degree-days (GDD) and accumulated precipitation charts, available on the OneSoil web app, measure how much heat and precipitation a plant receives and help evaluate changes in these indicators. The GDD index allows farmers to track closely and predict growth stages, then, based on that information, plan harvesting and other fieldwork.