Impossible Sensing LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase II: C51-32a

Description

Transforming agriculture is now a meaningful pillar of climate change mitigation efforts. Managing soil with conservation practices (no-tillage, cover crops, crop rotations etc.) mitigate the harmful effects of climate change by increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) content in soils, among other benefits. Broad implementation of these practices provides a significant opportunity for net greenhouse gas reduction; however, the lack of credible and reliable monitoring, accounting, and verification system limits adoption. Our innovation fills a critical technology gap in soil quality measurement, replacing costly and logistically problematic soil coring and off-site analysis with cost-effective on-site monitoring, accounting, and verification of soil carbon and other health indicators. The business and climate impacts of the measurements enabled by our technology cannot be overestimated: these are critical sustainability metrics to monitor soil health and optimize land management practices for higher crop yields that in turn reduce environmental impacts. An additional (revenue) impact of our technology is that it gives growers the ability to report increases in SOC across a geographic area reliably and continuously throughout the crediting period. This new capability means that growers can adopt and manage plot-specific soil interventions that maximize increases in SOC and payments. Our technology has critical societal impacts, too: by helping increase soil quality, it enhances food security, resilience, adaptation, and climate mitigation, allowing climate-smart agriculture to deliver on the sector’s sustainability potential. In sum: our technology finally brings scalability, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness to soil quality measurement. In addition to strengthening yields, soil health, and resilience, our service creates value share (profit opportunity) of at least $15/acre for growers with GHG friendly practices, 50% more than commercially available U.S. SOC projects. The objectives of this Phase II project are to retire technical and commercialization risks of our technology. We will be successful because we have validated that our technology provides the soil quality insights growers need to implement soil management practices that strengthen yields, soil health, and resilience at a price they can afford, and we have entered a license agreement with Susterris, a firm that gives us access to exceptional knowledge of unmet market needs. Our technology brings an additional value-add that will motivate growers: carbon proceeds as a recurrent income revenue from better practices which, in addition to addressing those three priorities, reduce GHG emissions and contribute to climate change mitigation. We met and exceeded our Phase I objectives.We [1] designed and built aprototypethatmeasures organic matter quality and quantity by capturing fluorescence and humic indices; [2] we deployed and validated our instrument onboard a commercial autonomous farm vehicle; [3] we designed an engineering model with go-to-market considerations that we will build, validate, and commercialize in Phase II and Phase III, supported by Susterris and Greenfield Robotics. Our Phase II R&D involves hardware and software development to deliver a pre-commercial product that performs reliable soil quality by utilizing our Phase I-proven spectral imaging innovation; is fully autonomous by integrating with virtually any farm vehicle; creates actionable insights by linking seamlessly with production software.