A Systems-Based Approach to Carbon with Nick Reinke

Nick Reinke, is not only the CEO of HabiTerre but also grew up on a farm, worked in soil health with an agricultural coop, and has a background in ag finance. He is uniquely qualified to help us explore how all of this “carbon talk” fits into soil health practice adoption, company involvement and sustainability goals. HabiTerre uses deep science and technology to quantify environmental outcomes for agriculture. But where many other companies focus on trying to measure soil carbon, Nick says HabiTerre looks at things in a really comprehensive systems context. Their goal is to try to determine how productivity and environmental sustainability relate to farming outcomes like productivity, nutrient management, and soil health. Nick says he was most excited to join HabiTerre because he saw too many people focused on soil carbon measurement missing the picture of what that means for real farm outcomes.

“I saw something just fundamentally groundbreaking about the technology that he had developed. So a lot less dependency on manually gathered data and still generating really accurate outcomes. But again, getting back to that systems perspective. Not just looking at soil carbon, but let's think about this through the lens of the farmer… Like how does this relate to inputs? How does it impact productivity? Things like that. So that's where I've been really excited to kind of join this scaling team here.” - Nick Reinke

Reinke shares that HabiTerre is collaborating with the National Association of Conservation Districts in creating field specific scenario modeling for what future soil health practices could produce. This “feedback loop” to farmers will serve as another “value added tool” for agronomists and advisors to use in order to support on-farm changes and practices. Furthermore Reinke breaks down the role agriculture plays in big corporations reducing their scope 3 emissions and why practices on the farm are of a great interest to them.

“Well, if you're gonna track progress, you're gonna need a lot better data, that's just logistically and cost prohibitive. It's very difficult for them to get. So we're trying to streamline that process. And the big thing that I don't wanna lose there is streamlining that process means more of these resources go to farmers…So if we make that quantification piece more efficient, that's more resources to farmers.” - Nick Reinke