Multinational pharmaceutical and agricultural giant Bayer has set up a new company that deals with the measurement and validation of the carbon capture potential of agricultural soil in Israel.
The company was established by Bayer Trendlines Ag Innovation Fund, which is, in turn, set up by Bayer’s division that focuses on agricultural and environmental innovations to propel the future of farming – Bayer CropScience LP.
The new company is called TierraSpec Ltd. and its technology is based on more than 30 years of research conducted in the laboratory of Professor Eyal Ben-Dor at Tel Aviv University.
Its commercialization was led together with the Israel Innovation Authority and Tel Aviv University’s Technology Transfer arm Ramot.
And the CEO of TierraSpec is Avital Levy-Lior, PhD.
As the world’s second largest natural carbon sink, soil is highly underdeveloped in terms of the number of projects eligible to issue carbon credits from CO2 sequestered by farmlands.
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In fact, only a mere 1-2% of all such projects can issue carbon credits, and the main reason for this is the shortage of reliable measurement technology.
Bayer and TierraSpec hope to provide a viable solution for this problem by creating a platform that will quantify the carbon dioxide sequestered by ag soil and validate it with the help of remote sensing, advanced machine learning algorithms and a set of unique testing methods.
The company’s platform is intended to be an inexpensive tool that will enable reporting of validated CO2 sequestration to carbon registries in order to generate and sell carbon credits.
