Three Ways of Thinking About Soil – from the crQlr Meetup Tokyo

If you’re like me, you probably don’t think much about soil. Let’s try to change that with some cold, clammy soil-facts:

• 95% of our food depends on soil. This can be directly in the form of the crops we eat and the processed foods made from them, or indirectly as animal feed.
• 59% of the Earth’s species live in soil. These include microbes that are the source of common antibiotics as well as other cures we’ve yet to even discover.
• 33% of the world’s soil is degraded. Soil degradation can be physical, chemical or biological, ranging from actual erosion to a decline in the nutrients and organic matter that give soil its fertility. The main causes of degradation are human-led: intensive agriculture, overgrazing, and deforestation.

In short, healthy soil is fundamental to biodiversity and our food security, and we’ve already lost a third of it. Sobering statistics like these are the standard way to begin any ecological discussion, ensuring that soil can take its rightful place on the list of things to worry about while simultaneously being powerless to affect. But there are other ways of thinking about soil that propose a radically different script. This was the theme of a crQlr Meetup held at FabCafe Tokyo in conjunction with BioClub Tokyo. 

The crQlr Awards 2024 focus on the circular bioeconomy. Special Prizes will be awarded later this year to projects that empower nature to create a new loop, regenerate ecosystems, and contribute to education and storytelling around the circular bioeconomy. Circularity is not just about material resources and manufacturing. It extends to agricultural production and management of the land itself, including one of our most overlooked natural resources: soil. The speakers at this pre-awards meetup suggested three different ways we could be doing just that.

Soil as regenerative – the circular startup approach

First, the good news about soil degradation. Not only can it be prevented or slowed using traditional methods such as crop rotation, cover crops, and organic fertilizers, it can also be reversed. To borrow a sporting metaphor, soil has bouncebackability. And the mechanisms behind soil regeneration are fairly well known. The problem is the timeframe – typically five years – which, combined with the precarious state of most food production, makes soil regeneration uneconomical for many of the world’s farmers.

Takuto Nagata is Chief Global Officer at TOWING, a soil technology startup that was spun out of Nagoya University in 2020. Takuto’s job takes him all over the world to examine the state of soil in different regions. As we’ll soon find out, regional soil variety is a big thing. TOWING has a product it calls SORATAN, which acts as a soil regeneration agent. It has three main ingredients: a soil-derived microbial solution, an organic fertilizer, and biochar, a carbon-rich, charcoal-like material derived from biomass. SORATAN doesn’t work in all types of soil, but it’s adaptable enough to be locally produced using any locally available biomass from rice husks to manure.

When farmers decide to switch from chemical to organic fertilizers, it does the soil a world of good by adding microbial life and drawing in more oxygen as a result. Long-term, it also improves the structure of the soil, reducing the risk of erosion. However, making the switch to organic typically results in a 30% drop in yield, which can take up to five years to stabilize. Adding SORATAN speeds up this regenerative process from five years to a few months, meaning farmers can switch to organic fertilizer with less risk. 

Already used by 600 farmers in Japan, SORATAN projects are also running in the US, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Australia. Takuto’s job involves traveling the world with soil scientists to identify new use cases. When dealing with farmers, he makes use of both formal and informal knowledge. Formal knowledge is the science of soil, which has advanced significantly in the last 15 years. But informal knowledge among farmers often points to the same conclusions: that soil is regenerative and something we need to pass on to future generations.

“Agriculture is culture,” he says. “It’s hard to achieve a change in thinking among farmers. They have to see the before and after. We know that the technology works, but the farmers need to see it. They need physical interaction.”

There’s also a financial incentive for the farmers. Because biochar is effectively sequestered carbon, it can be sold in the form of carbon credits.　Takuto wants to stress that biochar can achieve over 100 years of carbon sequestration and provides immediate benefit to both atmosphere and soil.

Soil as connected – the infrastructural approach

We’ve seen how a circular startup can improve soil health by tackling the economics of farming. For non-farmers, the only way to support regenerative agriculture has been as so-called conscious consumers. But circularity goes further by asking us to think beyond this binary producer–consumer relationship. What if, in fact, everything we do connects to soil?

Even if your life can be called metronormative – meaning you spend most of it in a city – soil is a lot closer than you think. We occupy many different economic realities but only one ecosystem, meaning the infrastructure you use each day will eventually have an impact on soil. Work in sales? Maybe you also work in soil. Drive to work? Covered in soil. Ecologically speaking, all soil is connected. It’s not just this dark, crumbly substance that exists in the countryside or the remote reaches of your consciousness. You can touch soil in so many ways, without getting your hands dirty. Just find the lever that’s nearest to you, and pull it.

Haruka Miki is an Operations Officer for the World Bank’s Tokyo Development Learning Center. While the World Bank remains the world’s largest financier of urban development projects, the TDLC is based around a knowledge-sharing model that shares Japanese experiences in urban development with practitioners worldwide.

Haruka’s field of expertise covers ​transit-oriented development, waterfront redevelopment, and municipal service deliveries such as solid waste management and wastewater management. While her work may have no direct connection to soil or agricultural systems, she points out that 60% of the world’s irrigated cropland lies within a 20km radius of cities and supplies 90% of our vegetables, meaning cities are already in a close proximal relationship to soil. What cities do with their waste has a direct impact on the health of local agricultural systems and far-reaching consequences for the wider region.

Haruka shares lessons from a knowledge exchange event in Abidjan, a city of six million people in Côte d’Ivoire. Typical of many large African cities, most of Abidjan’s garbage was until recently dumped in open landfill. During heavy rainfall or floods, toxic water called leachate can escape from poorly managed landfills and cause soil pollution, eventually moving into the food chain. Problems of this scale require major upgrades in urban infrastructure, making them quite different from the economic problems faced by farmers.

One lesson we can take from Haruka’s presentation is that ecological issues such as soil degradation aren’t always solved by direct intervention. The levers might be several degrees removed, perhaps located in an unrelated sphere of work, the economic interests of a distant state, complex financing mechanisms, or even in the fundamentals of society itself. Haruka will mention later that while cooperation with many different stakeholders plays an essential role in policy-making, basic science education among the general population is one of the most overlooked factors. Open textbook. Covered in soil.

Soil as autonomous – the speculative approach

We’ve heard about two approaches that work at opposite ends of the scale of human activity. The next overturns conventional thinking about our relationship to nature. Drawing on the work of philosopher Timothy Morton and others, it questions the idea that human beings are custodians of nature or that responsible stewardship of the biosphere is just a matter of getting our priorities right. This is a hubristic fallacy. We had better start thinking of ourselves as just one of millions of living species, each one pursuing its own interests and engaging in cooperation and competition. There’s a name for this: the interspecies economy.

The interspecies economy was thriving up until around 12,500 years ago, which is when humans discovered agriculture and began opening up a technological gap with rival species. Since we aren’t willing to give up technology and return to our prehistoric ways, another way to close the species-gap would be to share our technology with other living creatures. We could, for example, record the thoughts and feelings of soil – or at least the microbes within – and let soil decide how much it wants to give us, what the market rate should be for its work, and when it would prefer to take a rest instead. 

Cecilia Tham is a Future Synthesist and CEO at Barcelona-based Futurity Systems. Her job is to extrapolate from current events what might be possible or desirable next, and then prototype those ideas. She quickly talks us through some recent trends in commerce to show how we’re growing accustomed to having less control over transactions. In areas such as financial markets and dynamic pricing, machine-to-machine transactions are already a thing. This is aCommerce, or autonomous commerce, and it limits human involvement to setting parameters or goals, while machines get on with the work of transacting in real-time.

There’s no reason why machines couldn’t do the same work of calculating sustainable impacts and charging accordingly – if only we had the vision to let sustainability and not economic profit guide our species. But even that might be falling short. Cecilia is one of the leading global voices on the interspecies economy and is already running experiments with autonomous plants, which includes giving them the means to participate in the human economy. If plants were given decision-making powers and real money, could they sustain themselves by investing in water or soil generating startups? 

In 2021, Cecilia demonstrated this concept by creating Herbie, an autonomous tomato plant. Herbie is attached to sensors that render its physiological state as color changes in a digital twin. Herbie’s digital twin can be sold as an NFT and the funds placed in Herbie’s account to be invested in projects that improve Herbie’s physiological state. Cecilia has now taken this idea further by extending it to a wider range of autonomous plants she calls the Plantiverse. The implications are clear. If humans can’t figure out a way to reduce our ecological impact – and the evidence is not pointing in our favor – the wisest course of action might be to transfer some of our existing wealth to forests, soils or oceans and let them place curbs on our behavior instead.

About the crQlr Awards

This crQlr Meetup was just a taste of what to expect from the crQlr Awards 2024, which bring together circular practitioners from around the world to share knowledge and practical experience. Now in their 4th year, the crQlr awards will be judged by a panel of ten experts – including Cecilia Tham, one of the speakers above – with winners to be announced in January 2025. Special Prize Winners will have their projects displayed in Tokyo as part of the crQlr Summit and Exhibition, scheduled for March 2025.

About BioClub Tokyo

Established in 2015, BioClub Tokyo is an open, community-managed biolab located on the second floor of FabCafe Tokyo, a short walk from Shibuya’s famous scramble crossing. BioClub Tokyo has 30 active lab members and a wider community of 250 people including scientists, artists, makers, and fermentors. The club is free to join, hosts regular Tuesday meetings in English and Japanese, and is always on the lookout for new members.