Turning soil to gold

It is a grey day in Vancouver, but deep inside a nondescript office building, Karn Manhas, the CEO of Terramera, is bathed in artificial sunlight emanating from a miniature, high-tech cabbage farm. Dozens of potted baby cabbage plants, illuminated by LED lights, are laid out in a mobile grid housed inside a structure that resembles a shipping container. Every few seconds, the grid moves, rotating the tiny green shoots through a watering robot that looks a bit like a miniature car wash, without the soap.

The outfit can mimic real-life growing conditions like temperature, humidity, sunlight and wind, Manhas explained, allowing researchers to simulate field conditions from anywhere around the world on demand.

Though his machine appears better-suited to Mars than our planet, Manhas — a former law student and politician-turned-entrepreneur — believes the device and other futuristic inventions like drones and artificial intelligence will play a pivotal role in helping farmers adopt regenerative agriculture, a suite of practices that boost soil health and improve its ability to sequester carbon.

Soils are made up of a mix of rock, inorganic nutrients and carbon-rich organic matter like compost, roots and dead plants. When healthy, they typically contain lots of organic matter, which sequesters carbon underground and feeds vibrant microbial ecosystems. Regenerative farmers use techniques like cover cropping or rotational grazing to mimic natural processes, building up soil fertility and the amount of carbon in the ground.

Conventional industrialized farming replaces this natural process with artificial fertilizers and pesticides. While these chemicals boost yields in the short term, they also decimate soil ecosystems and kill vital microbes. The remaining organisms feast on excess artificial nitrogen fertilizer in the soil, transforming it into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

"The big value (of regenerative farming) is the paradigm that you can start doing something, you can start changing practices to be back in line with how biology works, how the environment works," explained Manhas.

"We're just out of the biological system and that's why we're causing this damage. The question is: How do we start getting what we need out of the land and have it back in balance?"

Nature will regenerate itself when left alone, he explained, but not always in ways that satisfy our expectations for predictable yields, cheap food and profit. The challenge is figuring out how to align these competing forces.