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Today’s interview is with Lars Dyrud, CEO, EarthOptics.
What is EarthOptics?
For those unfamiliar, what is EarthOptics, and how does your “Sustainability as a Service” model combine agronomic tools with climate-smart outcomes for landowners and ranchers?
EarthOptics is much more than a soil measurement company — we’re a soil intelligence and technology leader. While we provide the most accurate and trusted carbon quantification available today, we also deliver deep insights into soil biology, nutrient dynamics, and tillage practices, empowering farmers and ranchers to make decisions that improve yields and enhance soil health.
Our primary markets include the US, Canada, and Brazil, with additional projects in Europe and across Latin America.
Our “Sustainability as a Service” model goes beyond carbon measurement. By leveraging our advanced digital platform for soil insights, we help landowners and ranchers adopt the right sustainability practices, including biologics innovations, on the right acre — maximizing agronomic outcomes while simultaneously building climate resilience. This ensures that companies can maximize the value of their Scope 3 investments, unlock measurable carbon potential, and deliver verified acres for offset and insetting programs.
Digital Twinning With Soil
EarthOptics recently merged with Pattern Ag to build a full-spectrum “Digital Twin” of soil, integrating physical, chemical, and biological data for predictive agronomy. How does this enhance agronomy-as-a-service and align with landowner sustainability goals?
Landowners, farmers, and ranchers are all smart business people; they want to run their operations profitably, take care of the soil, and secure their farm or ranch for future generations. And they believe in sustainable business decisions and practices. Our data and software solutions provide high-resolution decision-making tools so that they can understand the “why” behind their spend - from what inputs they choose, to what seed they pick, to the compaction on their fields. We provide the data on a user-friendly platform, and users can then work with their advisors to make informed decisions. We offer a wide range of physical, chemical, and biological data that are not available through your traditional testing services, and at higher resolution than you would normally get from traditional agronomic sampling.
Regenerative Practices
Your GroundOwl™ Sensor Suite and software platforms, in tandem with the ground-truthed measurements, deliver high-resolution insights into soil compaction, moisture, nutrients, and carbon. How do these tools enable proactive decision-making for regenerative practices and sustainability initiatives?
Our tools allow farmers and ranchers to deploy the right practices on the right acres. For example, by understanding their sub-field compaction, farmers can choose where to till and where not to till - thus reducing unnecessary tillage or helping transition to no-till. For inputs, farmers can generate variable-rate application prescriptions, maximizing productivity per acre while minimizing costs and environmental impact. For Carbon, farmers and ranchers can visualize their carbon stock change over time, and choose whether to monetize the sequestered Carbon. With EarthOptics tools, it’s easier than ever for farmers and ranchers to make these decisions, reduce expenses, and understand the sustainability impact.
Monetizing Carbon Assets
Precision carbon mapping and TruCarbon™ offer lab-quality, registry-grade MRV at scale (~$2-5acre). How does this service shift the economics and credibility of landowners seeking to monetize their carbon assets?
We offer landowners, farmers, and ranchers opportunities in the Carbon offset space as well as the Scope 3 space, at affordable per-acre prices for measurement. EarthOptics carbon stock measurements are based on direct, ground-truth data. Because EarthOptics is vertically integrated, from sampling design to sample collection to lab analysis, we can ensure sample quality throughout the quantification pipeline, and offer quantification at scale at competitive prices.
Sustainability Plans
On top of carbon, EarthOptics advises on tillage prescription, nutrient optimization, pest detection, and irrigation. How do you design integrated sustainability plans that deliver on both profitability and climate impact?
Some of this is answered in question 3 above, but to summarize: EarthOptics decision-making tools make it easy for farmers and ranchers to pick the right practices for the right acre, maximizing their profitability per acre while minimizing environmental impact. This is the case both in terms of emissions reductions (through reduced fertilizer use, reduced tillage, and reduced inputs) as well as carbon removals through sequestration.
Bridging The Gap
As corporate demand grows for sustainable sourcing and verified ag credits, how does EarthOptics bridge the gap between landowner agronomy and corporate sustainability programs?
EarthOptics is working with partners across the industry in row crops and rangeland to provide registry-approved, verifiable environmental assets to buyers. Our services span from project design and consultation to sampling plan generation, sampling, lab analysis, and delivery in line with registry and other regulatory requirements. As corporate demand grows in both the offset and Scope 3 space, EarthOptics can deliver the industry’s most accurate measurements that are tied to actual in-the-field results. Our project design and ground-truth data-based capabilities ensure that buyers have credits and environmental claims that will withstand scrutiny.
Operational Learnings
Mapping over 5 million acres and reducing discrete soil sampling has lowered costs significantly. What operational learnings have driven this efficiency, and how does scale enable both better farming and better sustainability outcomes?
We are able to leverage our industry-leading soil data library to improve our sampling capabilities, and have developed proprietary software to manage samples and sampling end-to-end, ensuring the highest quality data. We also work with a broad network of trusted sampling partners who are trained in carbon and agronomic protocols and are efficiently able to scale across projects.
Into The Future
Looking forward, what’s the biggest technical or adoption barrier to delivering your services at scale, and how is EarthOptics structuring landowner partnerships to overcome it?
I believe that the biggest opportunity is matching up the right acre with the right program. There’s a massive opportunity to reward farmers and ranchers for good business practices, while generating environmental assets for corporate buyers, both within their supply chains and outside their supply chains. We continue to work on structuring programs in the right way with farmers, ranchers, and landowners, as well as with corporate buyers, utilizing our technology to identify and create mutually beneficial opportunities.
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