Episode 221 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
When Nori awards carbon credits, of course, we want to be as precise as possible and ensure that each Nori Carbon Removal Tonne or NRT actually represents a metric tonne of carbon removed from the atmosphere and retained in the soil.
At the same time, we can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good, and right now, soil sampling for carbon is imprecise and incredibly expensive.
So, rather than wait for soil science to catch up, we’re incentivizing farmers to implement regenerative ag practices NOW. How do we quantify carbon in the soil? And what constraints of running a business factored into our decision?
Rebekah Carlson is the Agriculture Supply Lead at Nori and author of the recent Medium piece, ‘Nori’s Stance on Soil Sampling: Why Soil Sampling Isn’t (Yet) a Silver Bullet for Carbon Credits.’ On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, she sits down with Ross to discuss the two different schools of thought for measuring soil carbon and explain why Nori uses modeling rather than soil sampling.
Rebekah describes the network of soil sample research stations that feed into crop models and responds to the argument that modeling is a ‘cop out.’
Listen in for insight into the COMET-Farm modeling tool Nori uses to measure soil carbon and get Rebekah’s predictions for when soil sampling might be precise, cheap, and scalable enough to work in our carbon removal marketplace.
Key Takeaways
[0:32] Why Rebekah wrote the Medium article, ‘Nori’s Stance on Soil Sampling’
[2:40] The 2 schools of thought for measuring soil carbon—crop modeling vs. soil sampling
[5:29] The pros and cons of soil sampling
[7:28] What factors might cause an inaccurate soil sample
[8:54] The network of soil sample research stations that feed into crop models and why some areas have more research stations than others
[10:55] Why it makes more sense for Nori to use crop modeling to measure soil carbon and Rebekah’s response to the argument that crop modeling is a ‘cop out’
[13:47] The challenge around setting aside a parcel of land as a control in soil sampling
[16:04] The COMET-Farm modeling tool Nori uses to measure soil carbon and award carbon credits/acre
[18:24] Why it’s not feasible to verify modeling with direct measurement
[20:08] The handheld soil sampling devices and satellite and drone technologies being developed to measure soil carbon
[21:11] Why Rebekah anticipates that soil sampling will get more precise over time
[22:48] Why Nori can’t wait for soil science to solve the issues around precision and permanence
[25:18] Rebekah’s prediction that the future holds better tools and more standardization re: what it means to measure carbon in the soil
[26:39] How long it might take for soil sampling to be precise, cheap and scalable
Resources
Rebekah’s Medium Piece on Nori’s Stance on Soil Sampling
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. It's a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon. I am Nori's creative editor. What is Nori? Nori is a carbon removal marketplace. And at this carbon removal marketplace, we have a agriculture supply lead named Rebekah Carlson. Hi, Rebekah.
Rebekah Carlson: Hey, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: It's good to have you to introduce what we're actually doing here. You wrote an article on Medium called "Nori's Stance on Soil Sampling: Why Soil Sampling Isn't," parenthetical, "yet," end parenthetical, "a Silver Bullet for Soil Carbon Credits." Why did you write this article? I imagine you probably had a lot of experience with soil sampling in your former time spent as an agronomist and researcher. [unclear] quite strong opinions on this matter.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, I do. So I spent many years like soil sampling for agronomy, which is just running through the back roads of Nebraska with a four wheeler, gathering as many soil samples as you can in the fall and then sending them in for analysis. But I've also had the experience of soil sampling for research, right? Of a replicated design. What does it take to understand like the dynamics of your soil based on X treatment, right? So the two types of soil sampling are really different but are often compared. And at Nori, we work with soil carbon, right? All of our carbon credits are based on soil carbon right now. And so we get the question of a lot of, how do you actually measure your soil carbon? And we strictly use the crop modeling, right, to understand the changes in soil carbon based on regenerative practices.
But we get a lot of heat. There's a lot of schools of thought of how to measure it. Is it just with modeling or should we use actual soil sampling? And because we don't use soil sampling, I wanted to write this article to take the time to unpack the reasons why. It wasn't just a lazy decision. It was a really thought out decision.
Ross Kenyon: I was listening, I swear, Rebekah, but I was also thinking about we've been making a lot of memes lately. I was trying to think of what's a good movie to have a bar fight and you would caption it of being something like carbon removers talking about soil sampling or measuring soil carbon. It's just like you being thrown in bottles being broken.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, that's it. That's what happens at the conferences I go to. There's chairs thrown.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] It is one of those topics though that the stakes are high. It's a really important question to get right. There's active disagreement. There's also good faith disagreement. People can disagree about how much precision is actually worthwhile. 'Cause there are also super lightweight versions of this that you wonder, like does this actually hold up?
Rebekah Carlson: Right.
Ross Kenyon: And then as a business, you also have to do things that you can't be perfect at everything or your scale will be negligible. So you have an easy job is what I'm trying to say.
Rebekah Carlson: Oh yeah, super. No, that's why I say it's like two schools of thought, right? I don't think it's like right or wrong at this point. A lot of agricultural companies have the funding to have soil sampling to back their carbon credits, but at Nori, we can't pass that price on that cost on producers. The cost of soil sampling for carbon is upwards of $60 a sample.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. How many samples do you need for an acre?
Rebekah Carlson: Oh, do you want to talk stats?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, talk stats. Tell me.
Rebekah Carlson: No, it's really dependent on soil types, agronomic practices. How do you standardize and stratify appropriately? And so having that kind of research going into even that one question is a lot of work.
Ross Kenyon: Trying to think about how to structure this to someone listening who is not super well versed in the world of soil carbon and soil sampling might make sense of this. Why don't we take a step back and why don't you explain these two schools of thought as you conceptualize them and maybe that's a good vantage point in.
Rebekah Carlson: Okay, so the two schools of thought are for measuring soil carbon specifically are to use soil sampling or to not use soil sampling. And if you don't use soil sampling, you use crop modeling. There's a third that kind of blends both, but I'm just going to talk about the two today. The first is soil sampling. Again, soil sampling for carbon takes appropriate stratification, which is a big word, just like how do we understand where to take our samples?
Ross Kenyon: We need the stratification, the depth.
Rebekah Carlson: No, not the depth at this point. It's like the over X amount of acres. How do you say like this represents one soil type, this represents another soil type?
Ross Kenyon: I see stratification just another way of saying it's the taxonomy of the soils being in the categorizing of them.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, the categorizing, so like the samples you take our the same or being compared to the same thing.
Ross Kenyon: So you might say a set of samples might be stratified. Right way to say it? You're looking for a synecdoche, right? You're looking for this sample will stand in for this amount of territory. And this is an accurate, good faith understanding of the soil type. That's what you mean by that?
Rebekah Carlson: More or less, yes. So it's questions like that of how to know where to take your soil samples, kind of assays you use when you take the soil samples and then run them at the lab.
Ross Kenyon: So what is an assay?
Rebekah Carlson: So assay is just like testing method for understanding how much carbon is in that soil.
Ross Kenyon: Thought about making a, that would have been a Christophe thing. If Christophe is here, Christophe, we love you.
Rebekah Carlson: Love you.
Ross Kenyon: Looking forward to talking to you soon. You would have been like, ah, I say what you're doing here or something like that. And then I would have gone, ugh. So instead I just made a meta comment about it. Said the joke I wanted to say, but was too scared to say under my own steam. All right, so stratification, assays, we got some definitions done. Hopefully that's a good background of knowledge for a listener who's new to this. Let's keep working through what are these two schools of thought with using soil sampling or not.
Rebekah Carlson: Okay, so again back to the first one of using soil sampling. The main, the purpose of it is that you get direct measurement of the land that's measuring carbon. So you're not making assumptions, you're at the land that we're quantifying carbon on, but it's expensive. Pros, you get direct measurements. It is exactly what you're measuring is feeding into the model of what the farmer is doing in this case. Cons, however, are that it's expensive, it's not standardized, it's data that, soil carbon understanding its fluctuations throughout the soil is really complex and not that it's a new field of science, but it's kind of been an overlooked field of science for a while, so our understanding of that isn't as robust as it is for understanding nutrient dynamics in soil.
Ross Kenyon: Pricing.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, well. Nutrients, I mean, the market drives it, right? Because nutrients make, in this case, corn and any plant, like the yield goes up.
Ross Kenyon: NPK stuff?
Rebekah Carlson: Okay. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and micronutrients. That has such an immediate return, right? You take your measurement of your soil, your low in nitrogen, you add more nitrogen, the next year, the yield goes up. Whereas soil, it changes over a long period of time. You don't have that immediate return of like, this is what we're getting now. Up until now that we're getting carbon markets running and showing the value for it, my hope is that research will continue to pour into soil sampling.
Ross Kenyon: For modeling and also for sampling, people oftentimes frame this that modeling doesn't have enough soil samples and you can't confidently extrapolate from the few to saying this region has some samples and all the soils within it map closely enough to this to be meaningful. But I've also heard people say that even with soil sampling, that dynamic happens within the same field where it's oftentimes the carbon counts even inside a field that is being directly measured can be radically different. Is that true?
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, neither are awesome. So on soil sampling, you're being so specific in that one measurement then extrapolated to the entire field. But everything that can go wrong between taking that sample and then estimating the carbon, like how deep did it go? Was there debris? Was there any trash from the top of the field? [unclear] But if it wasn't mixed properly, all of these sorts of things can get extrapolated to be like, oh, we over underestimated what's actually there.
Whereas on the flip side with modeling, it's like we made huge assumptions about what this area of land could give us or how the soil samples that validate and calibrated models were from a specific site. Can we extrapolate that to the further understanding. And so it's like, neither are perfect, both have their benefits, but which one's accessible to get the market going.
Ross Kenyon: When we are talking about these regional soil samplings being done for modeling purposes, how big of an area and how many samples are within that?
Rebekah Carlson: Oh, that's a good question. It depends on the area. It's really dependent on which research stations and research sites are being used to feed into the modeling. So back when I was doing research at University of Minnesota, I did a lot of crop modeling for understanding nitrogen dynamics and nitrogen leaching. And the models I used, like the amount of calibration that it takes, like you go out in the fall, you get a ton of soil samples, then build out a model. And that is good for, you know, the area of Southwest Minnesota. And I say that the grain of salt, good for my research in the area of Southwest Minnesota. There's a network of all these research stations really across the US that depending if they're feeding into the models that we're using, those represent the United States. That make sense?
Ross Kenyon: I think so. I'm wondering if it might help to narrow it down a little bit. I imagine there are some agricultural hotspots that have more than others. I imagine something like Eastern Washington and the Palouse with wheat, that's got to be, they've got to have, that's a discrete region probably.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah. And there's various parts of the Corn Belt that are substantively different enough that they have their own sampling. And it's really driven by land-grant universities too. And they're research stations that are set up across the state that represent the different soil types and just farming zones. So you can do appropriate research for that community.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that's intriguing. I can imagine, I'm from Arizona. We have a lot of cotton and citrus. So I imagine what is ASU probably facilitating to some degree research on behalf of those farmers?
Rebekah Carlson: For sure. Yeah, that's okay. Yep, they definitely have. I mean, I haven't been there, but grad students there work on all those grad students and professors and researchers work on all the crops there.
Ross Kenyon: And given these two broad schools of thought about to what degree we should start inward at the field level sampling and zoom out versus starting zoomed out and then applying it to specific fields, you think this latter approach with thinking regionally and then looking down into specific fields that are enrolled in Nori's carbon market. You think that approach makes more sense?
Rebekah Carlson: I do, even though I get sometimes people like, "That's a cop-out." For Nori, we're a carbon removal marketplace. We're not an agricultural company. Taking all the samples to understand what these dynamics are on that specific of a basis isn't good for our bottom line. We're not going to use these samples to understand our own models because we're always using third party tools just to [unclear] credits that are built on something that we aren't built on. Does that make sense? We want to use tools that we didn't build to understand our carbon credits because you'd be like oh we have incredible tools and we all sequestered so much carbon.
Ross Kenyon: What you're saying is that there are other carbon markets that are being started by agricultural companies and they're really interested in building those data sets where we've all, you also mentioned this in the article that farmers own their own data when they interact with Nori, but that isn't always the case for other soil carbon marketplaces because in the long run, this is much more about proprietary models about other services that can be sold or monetized through data that is captured through this and that isn't really what we're trying to do.
Rebekah Carlson: Right. We're not trying to do that and it's not necessarily saying that other companies are trying to do that, but having that kind of data fits in with their vision, fits in with their purpose and helps understanding on a greater scale. Like say these companies could do the aggregation, could understand the science to have appropriate soil samples that feed into our understanding of soil carbon over the long-term, everybody will benefit from that. But at Nori, if we want to make it accessible to farmers and not either absorb that cost ourselves of soil sampling or pass that cost on to our farmers, modeling is the place that we start.
Ross Kenyon: People often say that that's a cop out to you.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Why?
Rebekah Carlson: I think it's because they want the direct measurements. They're in that school of thought of they want what's happening on this field exactly so that we have high quality carbon credits. And we want to always incorporate all of that. But again, our vision is to accept methods, not build our methods, if that makes sense. And so therefore, we don't have the capacity. That's not even that. We just don't plan on making our tools to house soil samples and do that kind of research, but we do depend on other incredible institutions, whether it be academic, private, or public sectors that are doing this work that we want to incorporate at a later time.
Ross Kenyon: Let me know if this is the wrong framing for this, but soil sampling strikes me as a form of experimentation. For an experiment to be scientifically valid, there needs to be a control. Right? How do you use controls with soil sampling?
Rebekah Carlson: That's another good question.
Ross Kenyon: That goes to sound like the question of baseline. Yeah, I think we'll throw this, this word around a lot, especially if they use dynamic in front of it. What does that really mean? So like.
Rebekah Carlson: And so assembling our control is, you know, if you do with a specific question of like, how do regenerative practices affect soil organic carbon, right? To ask that question, you have to have a control of what happens if we didn't have regenerative practices, right? So if this is getting bit too convoluted, but having that control or baseline of we can use modeling pretty easily for because we don't have to set aside a parcel of land for a farmer to not touch or continue doing their old practices. [unclear] Prime land is oftentimes quite expensive in certain places too.
Ross Kenyon: I can't imagine farmers would always feel too happy about that.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, not too happy. From an operating standpoint, farmers are not there to run experiments per se at that level, though they're always testing a thousand things. But they're not going to be like, "Hey, I'm going to use this piece of land and do it conventional in these five acres and the rest of my acres I'm going to do something else," but that doesn't make sense for their operation. They just, they need to do everything as they see a best set for their land and setting, asking a farmer to set things aside, it gets tricky.
For example, that we did some on-farm research back at University of Minnesota. And one of the farmers that we were working with, he was doing on-farm research designs. Great. Running an experiment, the grad students would go out, take samples. Well, that year he decided to put in tiling, which is basically like burying pipes to help water drain off of your land easier. And he did that right through the experiment. And so the whole thing was ruined. So it's like farmers are going to make the decisions for their farm. And so having that control, if you're like, we want to test baseline for the next 10 years is a bit unreasonable.
Ross Kenyon: Did those grad students get held back a year? Are they still there?
Rebekah Carlson: They're still there.
Ross Kenyon: That's fascinating. And then someone could legitimately then say, okay, what you're suggesting may not be practical from an economic standpoint for farms, but it just isn't scientifically close enough to the truth that we can confidently say this. What might you say to something like that? I think someone could hear everything that you're saying and understand the position of the farmer probably doesn't want to be running active experiments or setting extremely valuable land aside for soil sampling, which also probably increases the complexity of their operations depending on the stratification, right?
Rebekah Carlson: Of course.
Ross Kenyon: Would this control sample just be like in the middle of a field so now they have to run their combines around it in some strange way? It doesn't sound like a lot, but that's probably difficult.
Rebekah Carlson: It could be. It doesn't have to be. But hence we don't want to, like we're not going to in our, from our standpoint, to do that.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, I think would demand such a thing just to make sure that if they were buying carbon removals from Nori or some other soil carbon marketplace, it actually existed and was being tracked and it wasn't just a vaporous thing.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah. Well, that's why we use like good models. We're using Soil Metrics, which is backed by DayCent modeling, and it's the COMET-Farm platform that uses all these models. And that platform is the only like, USDA Blue Book approved greenhouse gas emissions tool. So we're not just willy nilly, just, you know, running a couple algorithms and be like, yeah, point two carbon credits per acre. We're using the scientifically backed modeling that is using soil sampling to both calibrate and validate those understandings. And so that yes, it's a broader scale, but it drives the research towards understanding it more and more.
Ross Kenyon: Calibrating versus validating. Is calibrating involved in the setting of the baseline?
Rebekah Carlson: Calibrating the model of soil sampling, basically taking a model run and estimating carbon that changes over time, and then it's using specific soil samples to recalibrate or readjust the trend line so it's reflective of what's actually happening on that parcel of land or that given soil type for example. Yeah, modeling is dependent upon soil samples in order to build and calibrate the model and to learn over time.
Ross Kenyon: Couldn't you have both? Both modeling and soil sampling. Like why not have modeling and then check it with direct measurement? Does that make sense or is it more complicated than that?
Rebekah Carlson: It does make sense. There are a couple points of complication though, because we have uncertainty and error with modeling. And we also have uncertainty and error with soil sampling. So combining both of those estimates also combines both of our uncertainties. It just takes a lot more data points, and research.
Ross Kenyon: I like went back and forth on my head on this because I could see, are you maybe having multiple uncertainties in some weird way might balance them out or lessen that, or I could also see them just multiplying them. Entropy, right?
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, it's entropy.
Ross Kenyon: It all comes back to entropy.
Rebekah Carlson: I know it does. Second Law said like, there is a lot of great research that is trying to bring that tighter. I mean, some of these companies that are running all of this, [unclear] experimentations, there's a lot of new like sensor technologies too, something we haven't talked about of, okay, what's that balance of we want to model things out, but we don't want to take destructive soil sampling or like actually going into the field poking a hole in the ground and running it in the lab. And that bridge is using kind of remote sensing capabilities. And some of that research of that lending to make it easier, but also more of a direct measurement.
There's a thousand companies it seems like out there. They're trying to crack that code and I really think a couple of them will.
Ross Kenyon: I think so too. I've seen quite a few of them, either existing enterprises or startups trying to figure out the handheld spectrometer, the handheld soil sampling device, or to what degree that will actually take off here. Surely if someone can, although I could also see a host of other problems being introduced by such a thing too, can imagine wandering around their fields and thinking that they're getting accurate readings. But a lot of it is, I've seen things with remote imaging and sensing with satellites and drones. Some of it seems to be based upon the color that they're observing of the soil. I'm not sure how accurate all of these things are. This is another one of these like Roadhouse bar fight.
Rebekah Carlson: I mean it's, I, there's a lot of progress being made but it's not at the point right now that I've seen that we can be like, yep, that is a scientifically backed estimation of carbon that we can use to issue NRTs that off of.
Ross Kenyon: You have a hard job, Rebekah, you and, uh, Radhika and the rest of the supply team. And I guess Nori as a whole, this is really everything.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah. I know. Oh, gosh. Another roadblock, but it's really fun to think through, right? Because I do make the comparison a lot to nutrient sampling. What I talked about earlier, it's we understand like when you go and take a soil sample, you have X amount of nitrogen. And that will give you the generic prescription of how much fertilizer to apply the next year. But when nitrogen sampling started and our understanding of nitrogen use, it was really broad. And there were a lot of assumptions being made and we didn't know really kind of like how to fine tune that. So we apply like blanket nitrogen fertilizer amounts. But now we have like precision ag. We can understand our soil, you know, nitrogen in this case, dynamics like on a per acre or on a per zone level and we can apply nitrogen really specifically to those spots.
And a lot of times like right now we have this expectation of precision agriculture in every step that we take in the agricultural world. They're like well why isn't it like exact, exact, exact. And we always have to take a step back and say, we're just starting this. We're just starting getting soil carbon as a commodity for growers to understand how they can actually benefit from this in their pocketbook. And it takes time and research to actually get it down to that precision granularity. As we start, we have to be like, we are starting. We're pioneering this in that therefore we have so many questions that make all of our brains hurt all the time to figure that out, but we're not going to not start. How's that?
Ross Kenyon: I think that is wise and one of the reasons why I continue to work at Nori, I guess if I didn't, why even hang out? This is a long running fight in carbon removal communities. Many think that precision is extremely important and the soil science is not there. So we should just not do it at all. Some people are so value permanence that soil, it's so hard to make those kinds of claims with over time. But I think one thing that the biosphere has going for it is the sense of scale. I think if we waited for various types of direct air capture or lithospheric storage. Just roll your eyes. It's a word. And storing it in rock and underground. The scale of that is so petite that I wonder if in a decade really how far we will be. So I wonder, cliche, I don't want to make the perfect enemy of the good, but I fear if we don't take advantage of some of these low-hanging fruit, even with the risks, I don't think we're going to get anywhere with carbon removal, frankly.
Rebekah Carlson: I can lose sleep over these things. Like, how are we doing something that's good, right? Are we building something that actually is making an impact? And when I think about the bigger picture, these practices that we're trying to incentivize and we're using early adopters to show, yes, it is worth it. They have so many benefits, right? If we are getting more people to continue doing their cover crop, continue not tilling their soil, there is a carbon benefit, yes, but there's a whole host of environmental benefits that are added on top of that, that all of them are good, basically.
And so if we're driving something that is having this the sustainable approach to farming become the norm because it's economically viable, and not just like stewardship viable. Getting things to change in farming, it takes so much time and it's asking a lot on individual farmer to do that. But having this price associated with it to drive it forward, I think has so much benefit. And so it's like, okay, I mean, we're the first to say like, we're figuring it out, right? We're not here being like, we've, we, this is the right thing to do. It's, we're moving forward in a way that we're comfortable with, you know, backlash, but we do have good tools so that when we have the better and better tools, they'll be reflected in our marketplace.
Ross Kenyon: But in the meantime, looking forward, what are you anticipating with soil science, with agronomy as it pertains to soil carbon and carbon marketplaces?
Rebekah Carlson: I think we will have more research sites to feed into the models and we'll have better tools and more standardization of what it means to measure carbon in the soil.
Ross Kenyon: Do people use different tests and they try to compare them with their apples and oranges?
Rebekah Carlson: Sometimes, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Wow.
Rebekah Carlson: That's a good common thing that's still happening. Like why would a lab invest in carbon sequestration like equipment when all of their business comes from nutrients?
Ross Kenyon: Okay. What else are you seeing? Are you seeing any trends, anything you're picking up on?
Rebekah Carlson: Well, yeah I see like better tools, more standardization of our soil sampling techniques and assays that we talked about earlier. Tools that you can do with remote sensing that are also calibrated and validated by soil sampling. And I also, from an agronomic point of view, I'll put on my researcher hat, that's one. I'll put on my agronomy hat, that's another. And I would love, like in the next five, 10 years, that when farmers are making decisions for their operation, it's not just like how to get more yield, more more yield, that they're actually making decisions like how do we get more soil carbon because that makes an economic return on the investment for my family's farm.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think the time will come where precision is cheap and scalable?
Rebekah Carlson: I do because it has come with nitrogen, precision agriculture.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think this might be?
Rebekah Carlson: Hmm. I mean, I think we'll see like noticeable differences within five years of like farming operation and soil carbon. Ah, five to 10.
Ross Kenyon: I think we've asked this on other shows before and it's such a [unclear] question. They're already measuring the nutrients. Why not just stick a soil sensor in there for carbon?
Rebekah Carlson: Because we don't have one that's good enough yet.
Ross Kenyon: Just stick it in there.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, I know. Well, that's the thing, 'cause as we're still at this new part of understanding soil carbon, we need really precise soil samples. But when I'm running in November trying to get as many soil samples as I can from the agronomic point of view, I'm not thinking about the exact precision to feed into a scientific model. I'm thinking, I wanna get all this done before this ground freezes. So once we have the understanding first, then we can go [unclear] in the back fields to get soil samples that actually feed into carbon credit entities particularly.
Ross Kenyon: Well, if you would like to learn more about this, Rebekah's article is great. It's called "Nori's Stance on Soil Sampling." You can find it in the show notes here. It's also on Nori's Medium page. There's a lot to talk about. I love this topic. I like talking about these issues and the constraints of running a business and trying to balance [unclear], cost, accuracy, all these things because I think sometimes if you're not in the space of having to think in terms of constraints, I think it's easier to see a lot of these fights happening.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, I agreed.
Ross Kenyon: Find you not to be very ideological about it, you sound like you're just trying to work with the technology that's available in a way that actually makes sense and it's refreshing.
Rebekah Carlson: Thanks.
Ross Kenyon: Not to flatter you too much.
Rebekah Carlson: Flattering. No, it's exciting to that balance, like you said, the constraints really kind of puts a lid on what could be and they're like, what can we do? And so I'm trying to try to figure out in a way that works for farmers and for our marketplace.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks for being here, Rebekah.
Rebekah Carlson: Thanks for having me, Ross. It's always a pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we've been doing a lot together and there's more to come too. Thanks so much for listening and learning more about Nori. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] If you would also please give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps a lot, helps us get this content out to more people. Hey, and thanks so much for listening.
If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcast or a rating on Spotify, that'd be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.]
