Terra Ton Collaboration

XPRIZE

Quantify soil health for $1 per acre.

What problems will be solved with this prize? What breakthroughs will solve these problems?

Rewards system for sustainable agriculture and carbon sequestration.

What are teams required to demonstrate? How long should they be given to do so? Write down your "winning team will" statement.

• Carbon+ (nitrogen, phosphors, microorganisms, soil biodiversity)
• All soil types and geographies (or at least...)
• Mapping 100,000 (or more) aces in one year + verification

Prize purse: How much and why? Will there be milestone prizes in addition to the grand prize?

$10 million for device
$100 million for system

What is the desired impact that this prize will have on people, our planet, and the sector/industry?

TBD

After the prize is won, how will these solutions be deployed at scale? What barriers might exist, and what "impact activities" could we run during or after the prize?

Part of the challenge.

NickOttens

We would like to invite the community to analyze this prize idea from the perspective of six stakeholder groups:

1. Finance and investment
2. Culture and activism
3. Community builders and connectors
4. Multinational corporations
5. Policymakers and regulators
6. Entrepreneurs and innovators

When you put yourself in the shoes in one of these groups, how might this prize idea change? Are there things you would add, amplify, or modify?

stefan

Pls delete the numbers. Both of them: the 1/3 % SOC and the trillion tons. These are Indigo numbers and I don´t know whether they are realistic. The FAO hosted RECSOIL initiative estimates the sequestration potential of soils at approximately 2.45 Gt C per year (http://www.fao.org/3/i7235en/I7235EN.pdf). That is huge but not nearly a trillion tons.
Recarbonizing the soils is of key importance to get carbon out of the atmosphere and to make soils more healthy and agriculture more resilient and sustainable. Supporting this would definitively be worth a major food prize. You may have to share the prize as there will presumably be different solutions in different regions.

Let me know if you would like to further discuss. Kind regards, Stefan

NickOttens

Thanks, @stefan! I've removed the numbers from the opening post for now. Maybe others can weigh in on whether they're realistic or not?