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Digital platform to support regenerative agriculture

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Digital platform to support regenerative agriculture
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Dragutin Protic, Co-founder and CEO of Gilab doo, Presented the EU-funded AgriCaptureCO2 project, which aims at developing a systematic, robust and flexible platform for quantifying SOC capture as well as verifying and promoting farmers’ application of regenerative agriculture (Reg Agri). The digital, web-based platform will provide four services, namely: Quantification, Exploration, Support and Verification, that will run on EO data. The idea is that the services provide information that will support the process of certification of “carbon credits” generated as the result of Reg Agri and verification of Reg Agri practices’ application as a prerequisite for any incentives for farms.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
I will start just with telling you that the agriculture project is all about how to use your data as a basis for the services
that should support regenerative agriculture. So our goal is to make it easier and more profitable for farmers to adopt regenerative agriculture. So regenerative agriculture has become a very hot topic
these days. I'm sure that you noticed a number of headlines that just pop up in your browser if you're searching for news. For example, this one, restoring soil could remove
up to 5.5 billion tons of greenhouse gas every year or regenerative agriculture is getting more and more mainstream and so on and so on. There are really, really many, many headlines, many articles related to this topic.
Oh, this one is good. Biden will give farmer billions to fight climate change. So especially it is put in the context of fighting climate change. That is really an urgent topic for humanity these days.
So, but what is regenerative agriculture? We can see it through two elements practices. Well, what farmers do with soil, with crops and the outcomes of applying these practices.
Practices that we can consider regenerative for soils are crop rotation, cover crops, low or reduced tillage, agroforestry or integration of livestock and leaving crop residues on the soil surface.
And the outcomes that we can expect are carbon sequestration so increase of soil organic carbon, but not only that, also the improved soil health, increased biodiversity
and also economic benefits for farmer. But how to persuade farmers to do that, to adopt regenerative agriculture practices because it's not very common, it's not what they usually do. So they need to be rewarded somehow.
Two lines can actually use that goal. Either they can be rewarded by money from generating carbon credits or they can be also rewarded by receiving regenerative certification or certificate
like leave certificate in the United Kingdom that exists now for sustainable agriculture. So there are many carbon standard organization that manage carbon credits generation process
like VERA or verified carbon standard or gold standard, plant evil and- Guten, can you hear me? Yes. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you didn't switch to the full screen. So we only see the first slide.
Well, we will- No problem, but I'm sorry, I should have mentioned earlier. So you have to switch to full screen. Just a second.
Can you see it now? No, it's on another screen. I think you have a double screen, so. Can you see it now?
Yeah, now it's fine, thank you. Okay, sorry for the inconvenience. So the typical procedure for generating carbon credits are, it's usually start with the project design where the applicability conditions
and baseline and project scenario are defined. Then validation of the project design by independent auditors are performing. And after that project is implemented by farmers, which should be verified again
by independent auditors. And during the verification, the assessment of carbon dioxide reduction and removals is done. And finally, the organization that manage the standard register carbon credits and when it is sold,
then it is retired because any company can buy it and then the credits are retired and the money goes to the farmers. Regenerative agriculture certification is much simpler.
So farmers are doing, are applying practices according to the contract, which is verified by the organization who manages it. And finally, which issues a certificate to the farmers
and then the products of the farmers actually can be sold at better price and more easily and that. So what we are going to deliver to support all of that,
I will capture platform will consist of four services named quantification, exploration, support and verification service of which quantification
and verification are mainly, will mainly serve to auditors and certificate organization and exploration and support service will serve to farmers, will support farmers in their work.
I will tell a little bit about each of the service. Quantification service will produce, first of all, pan-European maps of soil organic carbon stock in a kilogram per hectare at a very high resolution of 30 meters
at three different depths. But for, and that's okay for a general overview of the state of the soil organic carbon stock over Europe
or national statistics or something like that. But for certification of, carbon credits, actually much more accurate data is needed.
So at field for estimation of soil organic carbon at field level, additional soil sampling will be required but then the service will actually provide location, optimal location for soil sampling. And the goal is to decrease the current costs
of soil sampling by choosing the optimal location. So less soil samples that will produce better accurate estimation over particular fields.
And it is uncertainty guidance sampling. And finally, it will result in soil organic stock maps at field level. Again, at 30 meter resolution and it will serve as a baseline
and also for farther monitoring of soil organic carbon sequestration. The usability is, as I said, for in the process of generating carbon credits. So during the project design,
it will be used for defining the baseline scenario for our starting point of soil organic carbon stock at the fields and also in verification process during audit and from measurement
of soil organic carbon sequestration. Verification service will also support certification both of carbon credits and regenerative agriculture certification. And basically it will serve to check
if the project and the farmer sections are compliant to the rules agreed in the contract or in the project. So it will be also used during project design to check if the certain fields, certain farms
are according to applicability conditions. So if they can start the project at the first place,
but also it will serve for defining the baseline and project scenario. During validation process, it will serve for auditors to check if the data and everything
in the project design is reliable and accurate. And also in the verification phase of the process, the auditors will also use data from the verification service to check if everything is done according to the rules.
And also they will assess the carbon dioxide reduction or removals. So, as I said, there are a number of practices
that we consider regenerative practices. And we will develop the methods for verification if the practices actually took place. And the methods will be based on our observation data.
You can see it, I will not read it because it will use a lot of time. But this is the list. Well, it's not final list, but it is the list that we identify so far
of the data that needs to be generated for the purposes of, project design validation and verification during the carbon credit generation.
So it will be crop type identification, planting date and harvest date, bare soil identification, or also if tillage happened,
depth of the tillage estimation, if produced tillage happened, then cover crops, crop residues, mulch cover, irrigation, grazing, flooding, biomass burning, and a number of land cover features such as grassland, wetland, surface and shallow water,
and forests and shrubs. Next service that will be delivered will be support service. And it will be mostly used by farmers. It will be built on top of the existing
commercial solutions for supporting farm management and crop monitoring, CropLab, which is developed by GLAB company and also Sat Agro, it's a Polish company.
And the existing functionalities of these commercial and operational services will be extended with new functionalities such as integration of data from soil moisture sensors, precision agriculture for resource efficiency
in olive production, soil management model, nature steeps some low profitability field zones, alerts for local pathogen risks, and of course, the guidelines for farmers will be provided so farmers are aware
how to use the services to optimize their production in the context of regenerative agriculture.
And the final service is exploration service. It will also serve to farmers and it is aimed to provide for a chosen farm or field and chosen regenerative agriculture practice the estimation of annual soil organic carbon sequestration
in tons per hectare over several years, but also estimation of the effects on farm economics by applying the practices. These are valuable information for farmers
because they can plan, they can estimate the benefits they can have by adopting these practices.
And the essential thing for our services to run is actually EU data. So it is very important to just go through the, what are the requirements for EU data by our project?
First, let's say that agriculture vegetation is highly dynamic, so time series of EU data is needed, not just one, two or three days, but actually the whole season should be covered with data.
As a primary source of EU data, we will use, of course, free and open sentinels, one and two satellites data. But as we have a partner in our consortium,
it's Planet company, we will use also their product, so which is called Planet Fusion product. And it will, I think, soon be operational.
It's still not operational. It's a three meter daily, spectrally compatible with Sentinel-2 products. So it is very important because it will be used for both filling the gaps in time series
of Sentinel-2 data, which is very problematic in some areas, especially Northern European countries, but also for when we need the higher spatial resolution requirements, when we want to identify smaller natural features
or agroforestry, for example, of some permanent crops, then Sentinel's resolution is not enough.
So we will also explore the amount of Planet Fusion data needed for smoothly operating agriculture services because, okay, Planet Fusion data is not free,
it's commercial product, so we need to find the balance with the data requirements and of course, budget and the cost of the services, finally. And that's all from my side.
I hope I didn't talk too much, but I hope I was informative, sufficiently informative. Thank you, can you hear me, Treguten? Yes, I can hear you.
So we have some time for questions. Let's start with the first question, this is a project, Fusion, so Planet Fusion, the three meter looks really exciting. What are the costs? You're probably aware of the cost. What are the costs per square kilometer or?
No, there is still no cost because as I said, Planet Fusion product is not operational, you can't actually buy it at the moment. So they're still thinking where they are still testing
the products, also they are testing it through agriculture projects, and they're still thinking about the business model and because they obviously need a lot of resources to generate such as advanced products
because it's really advanced product. And this is carbon, you said, so carbon, you said that the agriculture also predict, will predict what is the potential sequestration for future and how long in the future you think is this realistic to predict carbon sequestration?
I mean, you can always predict future, but of course, eventually when the predictions get very poor, then there's no point to predict for future beyond. That's a very good question and that's an issue that we are discussing. There are no models that, well,
at least we haven't identified the models that we can use for that kind of prediction. So for the time being, we use C-rot and we are thinking about using a century model,
but I'm not sure that it will satisfy our goal. So we are still working on finding a model that can, I mean, to be honest, I'm not sure how reliable
that this particular survey, we are talking about exploration service, but we hope that it can provide some rough picture to the farmers that what is the potential of their fields to their carbon credits.
But we have a question from many, many things. We have a question from audience from Javier Moreira. So they said use the baseline for soil sampling then you identify activities by using planet images and then no further sampling is needed. Is that correct?
That is the question by Javier. A simple question is we still don't know. We still don't know, we still have two years of the project to define such things because the goal is that costs for generating
carbon credits are the lowest possible while bringing the most benefit to the farmers. So it's something that we still need a lot of time to discuss. There's a question in just a second.
Could you, from Nick Ham from UK, could you say a bit about the difference between the validation or verification steps? Yes. Well, validation is done before the project is started by an auditor, which actually validates
if the project design itself is according to the standard. Standard is defined by, as I said, the organizations who are managing the fund like Vera or Gold Standard or similar.
Verification is done during the project implementation. So it is actually verification that the project is being implemented according to the project design that is approved, that is validated by the auditors.
Okay, another question from YouTube. How are the verification services aware of this project and are they involved in the design in any way if I understood the question? For example, yes, in the project design, for example,
there are, well, there are different standards existing for regenerative culture in context of generating carbon credits. But for example,
there are rules that carbon credits cannot be generated in land that was wetland and turn into arable land. So if we are producing information on the historical information of the state
of the particular field that are being involved in the project, so we provide the information about if it was wetland or not, or some natural area, you cannot cut forest and then turn it to arable land
and ask for carbon credits, it's not possible. So it has to be checked. And it's better to be checked remotely than going to the field or, I don't know, searching through some documents or maps or something like that. The last question is what the story does
there for secret services? And so the question is, why is this project maybe also following the ecosystem services related to water retention? I'm sorry, I didn't have a question. One of the ecosystem services soil does
is also water retention. And so does this project will also maybe track the service of soil in a sense of water retention? I'm not sure.