Advancing Soil Carbon Measurement for Sustainable Food Systems with Chris Tolles of Yard Stick
Chris Tolles, Co-Founder and CEO of Yard Stick, explains how his company uses spectroscopy to reduce soil carbon measurement costs by 90%, enabling scalable carbon removal and improved agricultural economics. Tolles details the hardware challenges of integrating commercial spectrometers into durable, handheld field instruments and the critical need for extensive calibration libraries across diverse soil types. He argues that affordable measurement unlocks the economic viability of nature-based solutions for major emitters, contrasting the low cost of soil carbon with the high expense of engineered solutions like Direct Air Capture (DAC).