Agrology and partners secure around $5mn in USDA grants for climate-smart agriculture
Alexandria, United States – Agrology, a seed-stage climate technology start-up, has announced that the company is one of six partners awarded approximately $5M in funding from the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. Together the partners will further develop the capacity for growers to quantify climate-smart practices. Agrology was chosen as the partner to quantify regenerative practices in real time due to their MRV platform, ground-truth measurements, and monitoring of greenhouse gasses and soil carbon respiration.
“This is an incredible opportunity for Agrology to work with leading academics to expand real-time agricultural greenhouse gas monitoring and verification,” says Adam Koeppel, co-founder and CEO of Agrology. “Farmers, ranchers, and growers need high quality ground-truth data to help them with the transition to climate-smart agricultural practices. This data will prove their success, and help them capture value in carbon markets. We are honored to receive a USDA grant to work alongside academics and growers to uncover ways to make climate smart farming financially accessible to growers of all sizes and all crops.”
Agrology is a public benefit corporation and a winner of two highly selective National Science Foundation SBIR Awards. The company’s predictive agricultural platform helps growers monitor crops and receive predictive insights on soil carbon respiration and sequestration, greenhouse gasses, irrigation, extreme weather, pest and disease outbreaks, and more. This USDA grant award will help Agrology deliver the first commercially available and scalable agricultural greenhouse gas measurement and monitoring system available on the market.
“The future of climate-smart agricultural production requires in situ technology that predicts, measures, and reports on CO2 flux and soil health in real time,” says Tyler Locke, CTO and co-founder of Agrology. “Not remote sensing or indirect modeling, but high quality ground-truth data that is gathered directly from the soil.”
The coalition of partners in this USDA grant includes a combination of scientists, farmers and the commercial sector to develop the practices that are actually climate-smart. Agrology’s grant partners include partner, University Corporation at Monterey Bay, and other partners including Huntington Farms, RCD of Monterey County, University of California Cooperative Extension, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Together this coalition will focus on California’s Central Coast cool-season vegetable crops, using research grade laboratory verification at the Huntington Farms Research Site.
Agrology and partners were included in the second round of USDA grants which focus on “small farming and ranching operations, including, but not limited to, underserved producers, as well as measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification activities developed at minority-serving institutions,” according to USDA.
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