Yard Stick PBC

Company

21-50

https://www.useyardstick.com

Company Description

Our Mission:

Yard Stick provides easy, accurate, and affordable quantification of soil carbon stocks. Our mission is to enable gigaton-scale agricultural carbon sequestration via scalable, trustworthy measurement solutions. We are the measurement backbone of soil carbon.

Scientists and farmers alike have known for decades that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric GHGs at gigaton/year scale. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon back - until now. By reducing the cost of statistically-sound and agronomically-legitimate soil carbon measurement by 90%+, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative agriculture and ranching practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer/rancher livelihoods, and combat climate change.

Our Technology:
Powered by technologies from the world’s top soil scientists and supported by leading grant funders and venture investors, Yard Stick brings soil carbon measurement into the 21st century. Our solution spans an integrated suite of software and hardware offerings which solve key soil carbon measurement challenges.

Our flagship hardware technology is a rapid, in situ soil organic carbon (SOC) and bulk density (BD) measurement probe for field evaluation of soil carbon stocks. This handheld device, based on over a decade of soil spectroscopy research, is currently being validated in Midwest farming contexts and, at maturity, will replace conventional soil sampling and labs.

Yard Stick’s broader software offering, available now, combines technologies that standardize and economize sample plan creation, sample tracking, and soil C stock data management in an integrated web-based platform. These features help establish a single SOC data authority - a key requirement as regen ag and soil C efforts mature.

Our work is funded by significant recent USDA Climate Smart Commodities awards, additional grants from ARPA-E, NSF, and CDFA, as well as by leading climate investors such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gate's climate fund) and Lowercarbon Capital (Chris and Crystal Sacca's climate fund). Additionally, our co-founding scientific advisory team features some of the most highly-regarded soil scientists in the world, including Dr. Cristine Morgan of the Soil Health Institute.