The top 30 cm of soil – the humus layer – stores more carbon than all the world’s trees combined. More than twice as much as the entire atmosphere. Within this thin, living layer lies the greatest natural potential for carbon sequestration – right beneath our feet. Protecting and rebuilding humus is therefore one of the most effective climate actions we can take.
Source: IPCC 2019; FAO 2017; UNEP 2017
Source: IPCC AR6, FAO Soil Organic Carbon Reports, UNEP
Decades of over-fertilization, pesticides, poor irrigation, and intensive tillage are destroying humus soils. This means not only the loss of fertile harvests, but also of biodiversity – and of a natural climate protector.
Source: FAO 2015, IPBES 2018.
What do these numbers mean for us?
The consequences are declining harvests, rising food prices, and growing hunger. We are losing not only arable land, but also habitats, biodiversity, and one of the Earth’s most important carbon sinks. More CO2 escapes into the atmosphere, further accelerating climate change. Conflicts over food and water intensify. More people are forced to leave their homes. Refugee movements will reach significant dimensions worldwide.
But this foundation of life is disappearing at a rapid pace.
Soil destruction – an invisible catastrophe.
Agriculture is by far the largest consumer of freshwater worldwide – already using around 70% of available resources. In water-scarce regions such as India, North Africa, or Ethiopia, the figure rises to as much as 85%.
This makes agriculture the epicenter of the global water crisis: unless we change course urgently, food security, biodiversity, and the very survival of many regions are at risk.
Quelle: FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), „The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture“, 2021
Only living soils can secure our future. Our soil monitoring device helps to detect early when soils fall out of balance, enabling natural processes to be supported. At the same time, it measures soil moisture so that irrigation can be precisely adapted to the plants – saving valuable water.
This allows farmers to cultivate their fields sustainably, strengthen biodiversity, and counteract the impacts of climate change – in harmony with nature, not against it.
Our soil monitoring device
More and more people feel that we cannot go on like this. That we can no longer exploit the soil, from which all life originates.
But the answer does not lie in new genetic engineering, nor in even more technology. We cannot solve problems with the same tools that created them. Smart machines or AI alone will not save agriculture.
True innovation does not arise from optimizing the old, but from a completely different way of seeing and approaching things.
The old worldview is driven by profit and exploitation of the soil: monocultures, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, ever higher yields – without giving back what we take. The result: depleted soils, declining biodiversity, and climate change. This has brought the Earth to the brink of catastrophe.
The new worldview recognizes that soils are alive with processes: they build humus, store water, create nutrient cycles carried by billions of soil organisms. If we support these processes, we keep soils healthy and fertile – for ourselves and for generations to come.
Our soil monitoring device makes visible what happens underground and helps us act in time, so that we work with nature, not against it – and learn from it together. It is a tool for observing, listening, and understanding. It is not meant to manipulate nature, but to give it a voice.
