About SiF
Soil in Formation (SIF) is a U.S. public benefit corporation that aims to help restore soil health across the world by scaling accurate soil measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) for farmers and incentive providers.
SIF provides affordable and auditable soil data that enables accurate and reliable government subsidy systems, insurance premiums, carbon markets and supply chain metrics. Our outcome-based data aims to provide all stakeholders with reliable information to act on.
SIF’s data aims to enable increased carbon drawdown, improved targeting of fertilizers, protected clean water sources, increased biodiversity, improved soil health, new income streams for farmers and reinvigorated and inclusive rural economies.
What is the genesis of SIF?
SIF is the result of a 10-year journey by one of our founders, Henry Rowlands, to discover an auditable soil health MRV. After working on these questions for some of the top auditors, pension funds and governments in the world, Henry performed deep due diligence on many novel and not so novel ways to measure soil health.
In the course of this exploration, Henry met Dr. Shalini Prasad, a biomedical engineer and leading Professor from the University of Texas at Dallas, who helped him discover a unique approach to soil health measurement, building on the know-how she had built up during the development of a biomedical sensor technology, which had received large U.S. government funding for the monitoring of human disease markers in the human body in passive sweat (low moisture conditions).
This discovery catalyzed the core technology that is at the heart of SIF: the first ever electrochemical sensors to be designed for low moisture conditions have enabled the first ever ‘wearable’ for Mother Earth.
SIF’s sensors are a key element of our fully auditable, reliable, real-time soil health MRV platform based on time series data rather than point-in-time measurements. Following meetings with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Henry also realized that raw data from the field, however good, was not enough for incentive providers to reward farmers for soil health improvements, including carbon sequestration. This realization led to SIF starting to work with Texas A&M Agrilife Research and Arizona State University to create a global data platform that would provide the context required.
SIF’s data platform has been designed to show the baseline and attainable levels of water holding capacity and total soil carbon (both pools of carbon – SOC and SIC) on any agricultural field in the U.S. or EU, thus when combined with current levels from SIF’s sensors or lab results, revealing where a farmer is on their carbon journey. We are now developing this platform globally.