This is a summary of episode 389 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to/watch the full episode
Quick Takeaways
Many early soil carbon entrepreneurs faced a fork in the road: double down on agriculture or abandon it.
Soil carbon markets have promise but depend on slow verification cycles and uncertain demand.
Agricultural systems deliver many benefits beyond carbon sequestration.
Programs that enroll farmers can take years before credits actually appear.
Some recent success in soil carbon reflects projects started years ago.
Policy uncertainty has shaped many soil carbon business models.
Emma Fuller decided to step outside the carbon credit paradigm entirely.
Her company, Fractal Agriculture, invests directly into farmland equity.
The goal is to improve soil and ecological outcomes through ownership and incentives.
Farmers avoid the complexity of MRV systems and carbon registries.
Investors gain exposure to farmland rather than relying on credit markets.
Sometimes the simplest solution is to intervene further upstream in the system.
The Fork in the Road After Soil Carbon
For people who worked in the early wave of soil carbon commercialization, the experience produced a kind of fork in the road.
Some people went deeper into agriculture. Others ran the opposite direction.
Emma Fuller chose the first path.
Part of that choice was practical. She had already spent years working in agriculture before soil carbon markets emerged, and she knew that the promise of carbon was only one piece of a much larger system.
Farms influence biodiversity, habitat, water quality, and soil health. Carbon sequestration is real, but it sits inside a broader ecological and economic landscape.
That perspective made it easier to keep working in agriculture even as the carbon market itself proved complicated.
The Slow Reality of Soil Carbon Markets
From the outside, the soil carbon industry can look volatile.
At times it seems to surge forward with new credits and projects. At other moments it appears stalled by policy uncertainty or limited demand from buyers.
But part of that volatility is simply a reflection of how agriculture works.
Programs that enroll farmers take years to unfold. Farmers adopt new practices. Soil carbon accumulates slowly. Verification frameworks take time to measure the results.
Many of the credits appearing on the market today were set in motion three to five years ago.
That lag makes it difficult to interpret what’s happening in real time. A burst of activity may simply reflect work that was done years earlier.
And it also means that building businesses around those markets requires patience—and often a degree of faith about where policy and demand might eventually land.
The Problem With Betting on Policy
For Emma, one of the hardest parts of the soil carbon business model was how much it relied on things outside a company’s control.
Many projects implicitly depended on policy shifts that would expand demand for carbon credits or make them easier to use. But policy can move slowly, and sometimes in the opposite direction.
That uncertainty made it difficult to build a business that could reliably support farmers over the long term.
So Emma asked a different question.
What if the goal wasn’t to make soil carbon markets work better?
What if the goal was simply to create agricultural systems that delivered the same environmental benefits without needing those markets at all?
Moving One Layer Upstream
That question led to a different design.
Instead of measuring soil carbon and selling credits, Emma and her cofounder built Fractal Agriculture, a platform that invests equity directly into farmland.
The idea is straightforward: align incentives between investors and farmers to improve land management over time.
When soil health improves, farms become more productive and resilient. Environmental benefits—including carbon sequestration—follow from those practices.
But the system no longer depends on carbon accounting to generate revenue.
Farmers don’t need to navigate registries or MRV frameworks. Investors aren’t betting on the future price of carbon credits.
The intervention happens one level higher in the system: ownership and incentives.
A Different Way to Think About Climate Solutions
The broader lesson from Emma’s work is not that carbon markets are useless.
For some sectors they may be essential.
But it’s easy for climate entrepreneurs to assume that every environmental benefit must be routed through the same market infrastructure: measurement, credits, buyers, and registries.
Sometimes the better move is to zoom out and ask a simpler question.
Where is the leverage point in the system?
In this case, the answer wasn’t another marketplace or verification method.
It was farmland itself.
By stepping further upstream, Emma’s approach aims to achieve many of the same environmental outcomes while removing several layers of complexity along the way.
And that kind of first-principles thinking may be exactly what the climate space needs more of.
This episode's sponsors
Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers
Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP
Rainbow: a developer-centric carbon removal registry
"Why carbon markets need field engineers, not just scientists" on Rainbow
"What scientists actually do in carbon removal" on rosskenyon.com
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