Enabling Adoption of Regenerative Agriculture through Soil Carbon Copilots
This work addresses the problem of enabling regenerative agriculture adoption for stakeholders like agronomists and policymakers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing data and models for localized analysis.
The paper tackles the challenge of measuring soil organic carbon (SOC) to promote regenerative agriculture by introducing an AI-driven Soil Organic Carbon Copilot that automates data ingestion for large-scale insights, finding evidence that diverse agricultural activity may mitigate tillage effects and composting may reduce SOC loss from extreme weather.
Mitigating climate change requires transforming agriculture to minimize environ mental impact and build climate resilience. Regenerative agricultural practices enhance soil organic carbon (SOC) levels, thus improving soil health and sequestering carbon. A challenge to increasing regenerative agriculture practices is cheaply measuring SOC over time and understanding how SOC is affected by regenerative agricultural practices and other environmental factors and farm management practices. To address this challenge, we introduce an AI-driven Soil Organic Carbon Copilot that automates the ingestion of complex multi-resolution, multi-modal data to provide large-scale insights into soil health and regenerative practices. Our data includes extreme weather event data (e.g., drought and wildfire incidents), farm management data (e.g., cropland information and tillage predictions), and SOC predictions. We find that integrating public data and specialized models enables large-scale, localized analysis for sustainable agriculture. In comparisons of agricultural practices across California counties, we find evidence that diverse agricultural activity may mitigate the negative effects of tillage; and that while extreme weather conditions heavily affect SOC, composting may mitigate SOC loss. Finally, implementing role-specific personas empowers agronomists, farm consultants, policymakers, and other stakeholders to implement evidence-based strategies that promote sustainable agriculture and build climate resilience.