This is an exciting time in soil health, with USDA unleashing $2.8 billion in funding for climate-smart commodity agriculture. The hope is that organizations receiving grants for soil health work will spend this money in a manner that best serves the public interest.

Working together to fix the soil health tech stack is part of this process. We can do this by harmonizing and standardizing soil measurement data and analysis. This will build a thriving marketplace that rewards farmers and ranchers for taking actions and delivering outcomes that result in healthier soils and carbon sequestration.

The concept of the soil health tech stack — the three-layer graphic below — and the need to bridge its layers were introduced in September 2021 in an article by my colleague, Seana Day.

Over several months in 2022, Farm Foundation and its partners, including The Mixing Bowl and TomKat Ranch, held three interwoven events to address the challenges of the soil health tech stack. Specifically, we looked to bridge soil data interoperability, calibration, or standardization, and ease the movement of digital information between the entities collecting, analyzing, and taking action with soil-centric data.

An Overview of Fixing the Soil Health Tech Stack Events

Soil Sampling Campaign: In May to June 2022, robust soil sampling took place at TomKat Ranch, an 1,800-acre regenerative cattle ranch in Pescadero, California. Point Blue Conservation Science, along with students from Skidmore College working with the non-profit The Soil Inventory Project collected over 1,000 soil samples. These were analyzed for total percent carbon by dry combustion at three separate analytical laboratories. Bulk density was measured at a subset of sampling locations to create a robust soil carbon data layer across five pastures where TomKat had applied treatment regimes.

The Soil Data Hack: The Purdue Open Agriculture Technology Systems (OATS) Center took the soil data results from the campaign to create a publicly available data set and combined it with TomKat’s historical soil data and other soil data sets. This was to establish a data foundation for a soil data hack that took place during the “Fixing the Healthy Soils Tech Stack” virtual conference from August 23 to 24, 2022. 

All of the soil data was put into the MODUS data standard. MODUS defines data terminology, metadata and file transfer formats to expedite the exchange, merging, and analysis of soil and other agriculture testing data. It is used by some but not all soil labs today.

AgGateway’s Laboratory Data Standardization Working Group is upgrading MODUS to MODUS 2.0 and is a key proponent of its wide-range adoption by all labs analyzing soil. As AgGateway outlines here, the use of standardized soil data can help scale the efficiency of a low-margin business, decrease errors, improve lab turnaround times, and feed data to farm management information systems (FMIS) for analysis and recommended action. 

The Soil Data Hack, a two-day hackathon-style event, was designed to make tangible progress toward fixing the soil health tech stack by encouraging participating developers to create open source code to help with the transfer and presentation of soil-related data in a common medium. 

Fixing the Soil Health Tech Stack Conference: The virtual event was four hours long on both Tuesday, August 23rd and Wednesday, August 24th, 2022. The broad arc of the conference topics included an overview of the soil data hack, the concept of the soil health tech stack, and how to fix it.

Results From the Fixing the Soil Health Tech Stack Events
The soil sampling campaign helped us develop a clean data set in the MODUS data format. It also helped us better understand the disparity in lab analysis, as two labs got the same soil samples and came back with different results for both soil carbon and bulk density.

During the two days of the Soil Data Hack, the hackers:

• Took the MODUS-based soil data and turned it into a JSON format
• Fed the data into a business intelligence and data visualization system (Power BI)
• Pulled it into OpenTEAM‘s open source FarmOS FMIS
• Leveraged FarmOS to associate soil data to GPS lat/long
• Used RDF (a World-Wide Web Consortium standard data description and exchange format) to put soil data on the blockchain and make it available for Regen Network’s carbon credit program
• Linked the MODUS data to any HTML browser for visualization
• Used HTML to compare different soil data

The virtual conference revealed broad recognition for the need to fix the soil health tech stack. Videos from the virtual conference and hackathon are live on the Farm Foundation YouTube channel. The videos include the conference sessions and also the report-out from the hackathon. 

Weaving Together Existing Solutions
Through our events, we determined that, by weaving together existing solutions, we can make great strides in fixing the soil health tech stack. Specifically:

• A dynamic framework for monitoring soil health exists as part of  Point Blue Conservation Science’s Range-C and forthcoming Crop-C Monitoring Projects.
• A solid data collection method exists with The Soil Inventory Project’s approach for in-field, distributed soil sampling and transfer of samples to soil labs for analysis.
• A lab sample prep standard operating protocol exists in what the Soil Health Institute has developed, and it will help minimize testing errors and variance between soil labs.
• A soil data standard exists in the form of MODUS 2.0 as maintained by AgGateway.
• Sovereign MODUS soil data exchange can occur through platforms like Purdue OATS Trellis to transfer data to XML or JSON. It can also ink to other interoperable farm data applications like OpenTEAM’s FarmOS and Ag Data Wallet, the USDA’s Producer Operational Data System or other FMIS programs. The key point to underscore is that data transfer tools exist to enable the data owner to manage what data is shared when and with whom.
• Large-scale open aggregated MODUS soil data sets can be made available for analysis through tools like the OpenTEAM Digital Farmer Coffee Shop.  

Additional effort is now required to build out the interoperability between these tools and others. 

The 8-Step Action Plan to Fix the Soil Health Tech Stack

1. Upgrade and invest in soil health testing infrastructure

It is widely acknowledged that the United States has the most robust soil lab infrastructure in the world. However, much of that infrastructure was established to measure soil type and soil chemical nutrient levels. With more focus on soil organic carbon and rising interest in microbial analysis, we need to upgrade soil lab capabilities to account for new demands.

In addition to physical measurement equipment, we should also add knowledge management infrastructure to enable the digitization of lab data in a way that will support levels of provenance, attribution, and sharing consent management.

We should also not overlook the need to train and staff an adequate number of lab personnel facile with the new testing equipment and digital data tools.   

2. Expand the use of standardized soil field collection methods to create a national soil health inventory database

Non-profit project The Soil Inventory Project (TSIP) was awarded a $20 million USDA grant to fund climate-smart practice adoption on 120,000 acres nationwide, and apply their distributed inventory system to monitor soil health outcomes. This effort is part of their wider effort to create a distributed national soil health database using scientifically proven and affordable methods for collecting and analyzing soil data. With its USDA grant, TSIP is better positioned to help other organizations overcome the cost and burden of collecting large-scale soil data in the field.

We should also embrace the further development of new techniques and methods that can ease the time and resource burden of in-situ soil sampling. Additionally, with the establishment of a large, ground-truthed soil database, one day we may hopefully be able to undertake soil analysis simply through the use of airborne remote sensors. 

Soil data should be aggregated in a national soil health inventory database (such as the The Soil Inventory Project is undertaking). That database should be an accessible versioned, searchable registry of measurement protocols enabling interoperability of results. Machine learning data sets may be fed input from multiple models (field measurement, lab measurement, and remote sensing) and a registry of measurement protocols will allow the comparison and calibration of analysis between measurement methods.  

Of course, soil data should be shared securely in an anonymized and aggregated fashion to establish regional baselines along the lines of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable & Reusable) data standards. 

3. Embrace standardized frameworks for field monitoring of soils

To promote apples-to-apples monitoring of agricultural lands, common frameworks and stratification tools should be promoted to help farmers and ranchers select indicators, develop study areas, determine how many samples to take and when and how to ensure data quality. Point Blue and its partners have received a USDA grant to promote the adoption of the Range-C Monitoring Framework to assist farmers, ranchers, and researchers with these tasks. Future standards such as Crop-C will be versioned to adapt to upgrades in technology and new protocols referenced in a common shared registry.

4. Promote and adopt lab soil sample preparation standard operating procedures

To minimize the discrepancies that can result from different labs handling soil sample testing differently, we recommend an effort be made to promote all soil labs to abide by the Soil Health Institute’s soil sample preparation standard operating procedures that were developed as part of their “North American Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurement.”

Labs can capture whether they have followed the protocols through tools made in Survey Stack or the Question Set Library. It will be helpful to have information related to the protocols in the metadata that travels with soil samples from the field through lab testing.

We should also allow for the Soil Health Institute SOPs to keep a registry of versions and that labs can capture the SOP version they are following when they are undertaking a soil analysis.

5. Promote the development of tools using MODUS to make it the standard format to harmonize soil data

We need to see MODUS adopted as the data output of soil labs. AgGateway is the leader in seeing the MODUS data format application in agriculture, and deploying infrastructure to make the definitions of its codes be machine-readable and machine-actionable. Right now they are in the process of promoting the 2.0 version and we should anticipate future versions will arise. Labs should make soil analysis results available in MODUS and available to clients online (in online data formats like CSV, JSON or FarmOS, not just in hard copy or PDF format).

During our two-day hackathon, we saw both a state government’s department of agriculture as well as a large digital agtech company commit to using the MODUS-based tools we developed. We should leverage these “early adopters” to refine the tools and then promote them heavily to gain adoption.  

Adoption of standardized soil data tools should not be limited to the US. The MODUS data standard needs to become a global format for soil data. Additionally, we should anticipate the need for data standards for future soil analysis. For instance, FAO’s GLOSOLAN has already created a standard approach for soil spectroscopy that should be promoted for global harmonization. Internationally focused actors like CGIAR, OpenGEOHub, and LandPKS are potential allies to create a global soils ledger.

The simplest way to promote MODUS is to provide resources for the development of MODUS-based tools and to promote the use of MODUS-based tools amongst the developer community.

6. Address sovereignty of agriculture data

While technical solutions exist to maintain a farmer or rancher’s sovereignty over data and data sharing, many in agriculture are unaware of these solutions; most software solutions in agriculture do not use these tools today. We need a conversation to get over the constant boogeyman of “data privacy” so that we can provide those who choose to share data the confidence that those receiving data will use it in a transparent manner for appropriate purposes.

Conditional data use agreements and consent management processes controlled by the producer need to be more widely embraced. The conversation needs to include the benefit to the farmer/rancher of sharing data and also needs to address (beyond technical matters) the social and legal aspects of implementing a trusted solution. 

7. Get soil health data on the balance sheet

We need a discussion on how to account for soil data on the balance sheets of farming and ranching operations. Is it possible to create a single score that encompasses the soil health of agricultural land (similar to a corn suitability rating, for instance)?

While there are emerging markets for soil carbon and other environmental marketplaces, financial recognition of healthy soils appears to be undervalued by land buyers, lenders, and insurers.

Research exists to show the long-term benefits of healthy agricultural soils. Tools do exist to score soil health, to hold environmental claims data and to enable benchmarking of data. However, where are market participants like banks and insurance companies in terms of adopting the use of soil health assessment tools in their financial products? 

8. Adopt a common semantic infrastructure for soil health

An additional source of friction occurs when different layers of a tech stack use different semantics (e.g., variables, controlled vocabularies, etc.) because this introduces the need to map/translate among them.

We need to develop and adopt a semantic infrastructure (a common set of variable definitions and their associated controlled vocabularies, distributed using APIs) shared across the tech stack to make communications easier. AgGateway’s Agrisemantics Working Group is implementing such an infrastructure to distribute MODUS Codes, their definitions, and other semantic resources.

With the addition of the semantic infrastructure, the soil health tech stack now looks like this:

There was keen interest amongst the event participants to turn our talk into action and our refine our tools to fix the soil health tech stack. I welcome your ideas on how we can move forward collaboratively on these initiatives.

Rob Trice is founding partner of The Mixing Bowl and Better Food Ventures. Other contributions to and reviews of this article include: Aaron Ault (Purdue Open Ag Technology Center). Chelsea Carey (Point Blue Conservation Science), Kris Covey (The Soil Inventory Project & Skidmore College) Dorn Cox (OpenTEAM), Andres Ferreyra (Syngenta; AgGateway member/volunteer), Martha King (Farm Foundation), Wendy Millet (TomKat Ranch), Cristine Morgan (Soil Health Institute), Liz Rieke (Soil Health Institute), Drew Zabrocki (Semios).

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The July 2022 Farm Foundation Forum included Dr. Dorn Cox, research director at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment and project lead for OpenTEAM; Michele Demers, founder and CEO of Boundless Impact Research & Analytics; Fernanda Avila Swinburn, senior research analyst with Boundless Impact Research & Analytics; Keith Pitts, chief sustainability officer and SVP of regulatory and government affairs at Marrone Bio Innovations; and Kate Zook, senior program analyst at the USDA Office of the Chief Economist Office of Energy and Environmental Policy. The Forum was moderated by Bruce Knight, principal and founder of Strategic Conservation Solutions.

Customer Demand for Environmental Reporting: A Look at Environmental Impact Measurement discussed the growing consumer demand for environmental impact reporting. Topics covered what customers are looking for, what actions companies are taking, and how the measurements are being validated. During the Forum we heard about companies’ efforts to provide their customers with evidence-based research on the environmental, climate, and human health impacts of their products. This Forum took place via Zoom on Tuesday, July 19, 2002, at 9:00 a.m. CT.

USDA’s Kate Zook kicked off the conversation, discussing what USDA is doing to measure the impact of investments on greenhouse gas reduction strategies, and the current status of agricultural carbon markets, among other topics. She mentioned the USDA is in the process of updating its “Quantifying Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Agriculture and Forestry” publication, with the new edition to be available in 2023.

Keith Pitts with Marrone Bio Innovations explained the path that led his company to creating robust life cycle analysis documents for their products, leveraging the experts at Impact Research & Analytics for that work. In addition to using the analyses as marketing tools and to provide to existing customers, Pitts said the data helped the company to make decisions to improve their operations.  

Dr. Dorn Cox wrapped up the conversation, talking about OpenTEAM’s work towards improving data interoperability and access. He discussed how it is possible to leverage data that might already be gathered for other purposes to create a more nuanced and full picture in the realm of agriculture to promote market innovation and transparency. “Stories about this move people but numbers move markets,” he said.

The full recording, including the robust audience question and answer session, and slide deck are available.

To be added to the Forum mailing list to learn about future events, please use the Contact Us tab at the top of the screen. Submit your name and email, and state you would like to be subscribed to the Forum mailing list.

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I often claim, honestly, that I am lucky to have the most interesting law practice one could have. Case in point: a few weeks ago, I visited a biology lab where I ogled petri dishes containing plants that have been engineered to produce proteins that are ordinarily derived from animals—a novel source of a key food ingredient that has the potential to revolutionize dairy alternatives. Every day I work with product developers like that one, who are using everything from artificial intelligence to zinc fingers to add to the already incredible toolbox potentially available to our farmers and ranchers, such as salmon that can be farmed in domestic land‐based facilities, soil microbes that can decrease the use of synthetic nitrogen, urban farm facilities, and better‐tasting fruits and vegetables. All have a laudable goal: to improve the way we produce food, fuel, fiber, and other products vital to our lives, both in the United States and globally.

It’s a truly remarkable time to be working in this field. Record amounts of capital are being invested in the agriculture sector—particularly in ventures operating at the intersection of agriculture and technology, sometimes referred to as “AgTech.” One source has estimated that venture capital firms invested $10.5 billion across 751 deals in AgTech startups during 2021, an increase in deal value of more than 58 percent over 2020. This also means there are opportunities to convene with developers, investors, and researchers at conferences and summits, particularly now that we are able to get back to doing some of that convening in person. As we face incredible challenges, the future is bright and full of solutions.

As I practice at the intersection of law and regulation, thinking about the future of our food and agriculture system always leads me to contemplate our regulatory system and the role it plays in advancing innovation. A significant part of my day‐to‐day work is spent working with developers to identify, understand, and secure a regulatory pathway for the newest of these tools so that products can get to market. I also work with trade associations and industry coalitions on ensuring that federal, state, and local policy provides a clear, predictable pathway to market for those new tools while providing consumers with the confidence that new products are safe.

Focusing on Risks, Not Hazards

We are fortunate to live in the United States for many reasons. Innovation flourishes here because of our world‐class education system, thriving public and private research and development programs, and access to capital. We are also fortunate to live in a country whose regulatory system evaluates innovation using the principles of risk assessment.

The goal of risk‐based regulation is to focus regulatory resources in a way that is proportionate to the risks that particular products, or categories of products, pose. Where technological advancements, and our understanding of those advancements, allow a greater understanding of risk, regulatory burdens should be lowered (or enhanced) accordingly. This approach stands in stark contrast to the hazard‐based framework used by some of our most important trading partners, under which technology is avoided or resisted until all risk—irrespective of degree—is ruled out.

Warp‐speed innovation is not without its challenges. In particular, it is a continuing challenge for our regulatory system to keep pace with advances in technology. Indeed, this very question was the subject of a National Academies report a few years ago entitled “Future Biotechnology Products and Opportunities to Enhance Capabilities of the Biotechnology Regulatory System.” In it, the authors predicted that advances would increase in scale, scope, complexity, and tempo—simultaneously—and counseled that agencies should prepare. But in order to address this increased volume of product development using new technologies, regulators at all levels of government need to understand the underlying technologies to be able to adequately and efficiently assess risk. Indeed, the study authors advocate for increasing agencies’ scientific capabilities, and for agencies to increase investments in regulatory science, among other recommendations.

The Role of Stakeholders in Promoting Innovation

We all have a role in identifying opportunities to harmonize advancement with the appropriate level of regulatory resources. All stakeholders should take advantage of every opportunity afforded them to communicate with regulators about what challenges they are facing, and what tools are needed to solve them. Product developers—large, small, public, private, and all the rest—should communicate with the agencies that will regulate them about what products are in the pipeline (in a manner that is in balance with the important need to protect valuable IP) and communicate with Congress about where additional resources or capabilities are needed. And Congress and the executive branch should use their existing authorities to ensure that agencies have all the resources they need to work cooperatively with developers to conduct timely and complete reviews.

Karen Carr counsels, advocates, and litigates on behalf of food and agriculture companies and industry groups, with a focus on agricultural technology, food, biotechnology, pesticides and other chemical substances, and environmental law. She co-leads ArentFox Schiff’s AgTech industry group.

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Here are a few of the key themes that emerged:

Speakers and participants discussed possible solutions to build and retain resilience into the future. Most solutions included a combination of collaboration—across organizations, stakeholders, sectors, and countries. Technology solutions also will play a role in resilience, with robotics and AI highlighted.

Round Table Fellows take the insights shared at the meeting back home to integrate into their own organizations. In addition, Farm Foundation continues to hone the ideas from the “think tank” idea generation aspect of the meeting into its “do tank” model accelerating practical solutions for agriculture.  Reach out if you would like to collaborate on solutions as we work to build and maintain resilience in the food and agricultural system. Our next Round Table meeting will take place in June 2022 in Boise, Idaho.

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A report commissioned by CropLife International (CLI)—The Impact of Delays in Chinese Approvals of Biotech Crops—examines the economic impact of these delays on the corn and soybean markets for the United States, Brazil, Argentina and China. The report, which was done by Informa’s Agribusiness Consulting Group, uses a “functional regulatory system” as a baseline, against which China’s current system for biotechnology approval is assessed. Generally speaking, a functional regulatory system refers to a system that is predictable, science-based, and not subject to undue influence or delays. The study took a two-pronged approach by estimating historic losses over the six-year period from 2010-2016 and projecting future losses during the five-year period of 2017-2022.

China’s system for approving new biotechnology traits is considered sluggish for several reasons. First, China will not approve a biotech event until that event has been approved in the country of production. Second, China frequently will stop the approval process to request additional information. While it is not unusual for a regulatory body to request additional information from a petitioner, these requests happen far more frequently with Chinese regulators and the requests do not always appear necessary, nor are they clear and transparent. Third, the petitioner has no clear timeframe under which these approvals take place, making it difficult to project future gains or losses.

The study suggests heavy losses for U.S. corn of nearly $3.3 billion during the period of 2010-2016. Moreover, the study predicts that the value of U.S. corn production would be $1.8 billion to $5 billion higher during the period of 2017-2022 if China’s approval system would have been functional. Despite sluggish approvals, there was relatively little impact on soy approval from 2010-2018. However, the report’s analysis of future U.S. soy markets yielded a far more impactful result of $875 million to more than $2 billion for the period 2017-2022. To make its case, the study looks at approval dates for 17 biotech events across several countries and compared them to China’s approval dates.

Brazil and Argentina experienced similar stunting of their corn exports due to China’s approval regime. However, the calculated losses to the Latin American countries’ soy markets were far more significant than that of the United States—roughly $1.1 billion to $3.2 billion during 2010-2016, and $1.5 billion to $4.8 billion from 2017-2022.

The study does not limit itself to merely evaluating crop losses. It also calculates losses of U.S. employment, wages and GDP. In sum, the study estimates that the U.S. economy lost close to $15 billion during a five-year period. During the same period, the Canadian economy lost more than $271 million, while Brazil’s economy lost more than $4.9 billion and Argentina lost more than $2.1 billion.

Studies providing economic impact assessments of trade barriers, such as the one commissioned by CLI, are a critical tool for governments in taking remedial enforcement actions on trade barriers.

Author Daniella Taveau is Principal with Bold Text Strategies. She is a former International Policy Analyst with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and a Trade Negotiator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she represented the United States in the World Trade Organization SPS and TBT Committees, and in U.S. free trade agreements.

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