#256 Soil Health, Carbon Markets & Measuring the Hidden Climate Solution Beneath Our Feet | Chris Tolles (Yard Stick PBC)

How can we fight climate change by focusing underground?

It turns out one of the biggest untapped climate solutions isn’t in the air—or in the trees, it’s in the soil beneath our feet. Today’s guest has developed a game-changing way to measure and protect soil organic carbon, helping farmers, agribusinesses, and carbon markets work together for climate impact and economic resilience.

Our guest is Chris Tolles, Founder & CEO of Yard Stick PBC.

Some quotes to hook you:

“Soils store way, way more carbon than all the trees and plants and animals combined.”

“If you want to sell soil carbon credits, you’ve got to measure soil carbon—accurately and at scale.”

“Healthy soils aren’t just about climate—they’re about keeping Cheerios on the shelves.”

“Identify the application of your technology that helps someone make money or save money—that’s what all businesses do.”

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Show Notes: Topics

05:50 – What Yardstick does and how the tech works

08:07 – Why soil organic carbon matters for climate and food security

09:31 – Is higher soil carbon concentration always better?

09:31 – Yardstick’s two main revenue streams

14:02 – Climate product or economic solution?

17:21 – How big companies will make the change

30:12 – Is framing as a “climate solution” a dead end?

36:45 – Balancing production and soil health

42:16 – Revisiting emissions per calorie in agriculture

49:10 – Messaging Yardstick to different audiences

Links- Connect with Somil | Connect with Silas- Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn- This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

Transcript

Silas Mähner (00:00.12)
Today, Chris Tallis, the founder and CEO of Yardstick is coming on the pod.

Chris Tolles (00:07.162)
SoC is the focus of our measurement technology.

They have a very novel and interesting methodology and technology for measuring soil carbon content.

super super important but soils store way way way way way more carbon around the world than all the trees the world combined. voluntary carbon marketplace is not sufficient to have this sort of global scale impact that we want in agriculture through soil.

Our conversation today is largely around the importance of soil health, how to improve it, and then how to message your solution.

Our ability to put off to future generations and to current generations in other parts of the world is incredible.

Silas Mähner (00:50.67)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Clean Techies, the podcast, the best podcast for clean tech founders who want to learn from others. I'm Silas Manor, clean tech headhunter at Earth Tech Talent. And today I will be your host. So today, Chris Tallis, the founder and CEO of Yardstick is coming on the pod and they have a very novel and interesting methodology and technology for measuring soil carbon content or soil health, right? And their customers are anyone who is buying soil carbon credits, who needs verification of those.

you know, of those credits and how good the carbon actually is. Think of Microsoft, et cetera. And there are other customers are in the agriculture space who want to measure the health of their soil to improve the resilience of their supply chains because some people are realizing that soil health is very important for long-term stability in their supply chains. Think of people like General Mills, which is one of our customers. Our conversation today is largely around the importance of soil health, how to improve it, and then how to message your solution.

So we actually spent quite a bit of time on that final part, both from a media perspective, but also from a, know, how do I market my startup perspective, especially in this kind of anti-climate age, if you will. So I personally really enjoyed this episode and I hope you will too. As a heads up, we did run into some recording issues. So if you catch any of that, we do apologize and appreciate your patience. All right, enjoy the show. All right, Chris, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

very well. Thanks for having me.

I'm slightly jealous of you being in Spain right now as we're recording this. It's a very nice time to be in Spain, but things are coming on, I'm glad we were able to arrange this in such short notice. So let's start off with this. Who is a Climatech OG, or as we like to call them, a clean techie that you would love to have dinner or coffee with?

Chris Tolles (02:29.006)
Yeah, so I saw you were going to pose this question and I felt a lot of pressure to come up with something like really clever and interesting. And I didn't, but I was reading a story about Germany in the 1930s at the same time. And there's a guy named Haber, who's a very famous German chemist who famously invented many things, some of which are terrible, not to get too heavy, but like namely the precursor to the gas that was used to gas many people.

to death in World War II, but he's most famous contemporarily for the Haber-Bosch process, which is the chemical kind of chemistry process. That's the basis of most contemporary synthetic fertilizer. People use different names for it. I'm not really partial to any one or the other, but you know, everything we do affects climate and feeding lots of people is incredibly important. Explosion of

food productivity over the twentieth century is enabled a lot of things that i love most helping human in the world today so his legacy is mixed many technologies right can be used for good or evil but homie haber for the paper box process that were of course seen in the downsides of like over deployment of some of these but he came up with this other book and so he's top of mind for me right now

That's a very interesting observation that I think it's very difficult sometimes for climate people to reconcile that there is good and bad in different technologies and different people. We're looking at the Trump administration, obviously, there's certain things that some people really like and some people really absolutely despise, understandably. You can never get a perfect person, And you can never get a perfect technology either, unfortunately. But it's up to us to be good stewards of it,

Exactly. And acknowledge that even we contain those two pieces. I think all the truest things in the world are about holding paradox. And this is one of the truest things is that, yeah, we all have influence for good. We all have other kinds of influence to pretend like, especially, I think there's a lot of valorizing of founders in the climate tech sector, we're going to do it, we're going to fix the problem. That's all good.

Chris Tolles (04:39.47)
A big part of why I do this job is because I want to get out of bed in the morning and know I'm contributing to something meaningful. want to look my kid in the eye. yeah, you know, the world is complex. And I think woe to the technologist that sees things through a binary lens of like good.

Yeah, exactly. So also for people who may not be familiar with what you're doing, can you just give us a really quick explanation of what yardstick is and then keeping in mind this could be for somebody who's not necessarily in climate. Yep.

Yeah, you bet. So yardstick measures soil carbon, specifically soil organic carbon at SOC is the focus of our measurement technology. Most people are aware of how trees store carbon from the atmosphere. Photosynthesis takes CO2 from the air and sticks it in woody biomass, trees and leaves and stuff like that. Trees are super, super important, but soils store way, way, way, way, way more carbon around the world than all the trees of world combined. Actually,

more carbon than all of the trees and all of the plants and all of the animals combined. Soils are a massive carbon sink, but it's been pretty invisible because it's literally underground. We can't see almost any of it. And it's been really hard to measure. You famously what gets measured gets managed. And so the attention that's been put on forests, preserving them, restoring them, super critical. Take that exact same story and just find, replace forests for soils. Because soils store all this organic carbon, we need to keep it there.

We need to reverse the destruction of solar organic carbon stocks that have already occurred. But if we don't have good measurement, how the heck are we going to know what's working? So Yardstick has developed a new way of measuring soil carbon so that we can figure out what's working and do more of what's working and stop doing the stuff that's not working.

Silas Mähner (06:25.326)
Yeah, so I think you may have sort of answered this already, why is measuring soil carbon important just because it has so much impact on the world at large?

Yeah, so beware of false band binaries, but I'm going to give you a binary way of thinking about this, which is that you either care about climate change or you don't care about climate change. If you care about climate change, measuring soil carbon is essential for the reason you just described. It's one of the largest stocks in the whole world. We need to keep the stocks where they are. Again, back to forests. We need to restore forests that have been destroyed. We need to grow more forests. We need to preserve forests that already exist. If all you care about is climate, soil organic carbon stocks are essential in the same way.

If you don't care about climate, soil organic carbon is important because it is the basis of all food or 99 % of our food, basically, besides fish. And even then, fish and soil agriculture intersect a lot in farmed fisheries. But we eat things that come from the earth. The earth provides our food because of how soil supports crops. And solar organic carbon is simultaneously this very specific

climate specialist interest and this incredibly general enabler of all human civilization by way of Solar gonna carbon is the best indicator of overall soil health. It's essential to all soil function. So these are two enormously overlapping groups of people, but whether you care about climate or don't care about climate, taking care of soil carbon is super important. That's why I it is super important.

So is having more, just for very simple terms, is having more carbon in the soil going to produce more crops usually?

Chris Tolles (08:07.982)
Yeah, I'm not a soil scientist, neither are you. Not much of our audience is. So with apologies to the soil scientists in the audience, to oversimplify a little bit, yeah, higher soil organic carbon values generally are better. Solar organic carbon as a concentration is usually the way it's measured, a percentage of mass you can think of it. Hey, of this, you know, 100 units of soil, what percentage of it is in the form of soil organic carbon, the specific compound. Agricultural soils in the US, like

famously our Midwest, you know, the breadbasket of America's is an amazing agricultural system. Weak soils could have 0.5 to 1 % organic carbon. Amazing soils could have five, 6 % organic carbon. It's not as simple as always, as you know, big number equals good, big number equals food. But all things equal higher organic carbon soils are going to be more productive, they're going to be more resilient, they're going to use water more efficiently, etc.

Yeah, I'm really tempted to just start asking you questions about agriculture because there's a lot of things I I have very passionate about this space because both my parents were raised as farmers But I think we would completely lose the point of this podcast But let me let me ask you this so obviously, you know only only climate tech companies that make money continue to succeed So what is your guys's economic strategy? How do you make money? Where's the economic value that you provide? Yeah

You're the host.

Chris Tolles (09:31.608)
So we make money from two different sources right now to oversimplify. One is customers in the voluntary carbon marketplace. That's what most people know yardstick for, if they know us at all. We'll come back to that. And the second are folks that are measuring solar and carbon for reasons beyond the voluntary carbon marketplace. So most people in climate that have come across yardstick think of us as an enabler.

of high quality, soil carbon based credits in the VCM, the Voluntary Carbon Marketplace offsets, you know, are another way to describe credits. Nature-based solutions in the VCM have had an extremely checkered past. A lot of our work to date has unlikely been actually positive in terms of climate impact. And a key challenge of that is measurement. So soil carbon methodologies, methodology is the word that means sort of the rules of minting.

credits in the VCM. So carbon methodologies are very new. The oldest one that's kind of really seeing market traction is like four or five years old. So we're just seeing the first soil carbon credits come to market. And in order to sell high quality credits have based on soil carbon. Unsurprisingly, one must measure soil carbon. Yeah. So yardstick is a novel way of doing that measurement. It's called in situ spectroscopy, we can spend more time on the technology itself if you want.

But essentially we're replacing laboratory analysis with a movie. It's an optical technology. And so our customers in that part of our business are hiring us because their business model is to sell credits in the voluntary carbon marketplace. Microsoft has a net zero goal. It's got to be on net zero goal. They have a carbon buying team. Carbon buying team goes out to the marketplace says, hey, what are the best products out there? They choose Indigo as a supplier of solar carbon credits. Indigo must hire a service provider, in this case, Yardstick.

others to measure soil carbon aligned to the methodological requirements of the credits that it's producing. That's very straightforward. If you want credits, you got to measure soil carbon. That's what we do. Yeah. The second and that's super important work. We love that work. Heck yeah. And my view is that the voluntary carbon marketplace is not sufficient to have the sort of global scale impact that we want in agriculture through soils. So the second segment

Chris Tolles (11:54.284)
which is smaller in terms of absolute dollars, but we believe will be more of our long game as a company, is measuring soil carbon for other reasons. And those are varied. Some of our customers are measuring soil carbon within their supply chains because they know the relationship, as I mentioned, between carbon content and resiliency. So for example, Organic Valley is a customer, General Mills is a customer.

These companies, they may have net zero goals, but they're largely interested in soil carbon because it helps them understand whether their supply chain will continue to perform. If you're General Mills, you make a lot of money selling Cheerios. Cheerios are made of oats. If because your soils are degraded, you're not producing oats as efficiently with higher costs. no, there was a super dry year and yield went down. You got a problem because without oats, no Cheerios and no Cheerios, no revenue.

So any company with an agricultural supply chain is extremely exposed to the risk of unhealthy soils. Solar organic carbon is the single best indicator of healthy soils. That's not a yardstick opinion. That's like a strongly evidence-based fact within the soil science community. Many other things also characterize soil health, but solar organic carbon is the single best indicator of soil health. So these companies are saying, wow, weather is changing more quickly than we expected.

Water is changing more quickly than expected. If I want to continue to sell lots of Cheerios, which I do, that's what I do, it's my whole business, man, I got to get down in my supply chain through all the middle people of my supply chain and start to understand where is risk accumulating in my supply chain? How do I improve the health of my soils so that I can keep selling Cheerios? Because that's my business model.

This is very fascinating. So I just want to make one observation that I've begun to really start to kind of internalize with the best climate tech companies usually have a very non like it's not necessarily connected to climate tech, at least not directly or climate solutions, but their technology can solve the climate, you know, a climate problem, but also solve a problem for people like general mills. And if you think about it, eventually that that problem will, will then be very obviously connected to the climate issues because

Silas Mähner (14:02.286)
Maybe not necessarily, could say it's not just climate, it's also about health and sustainability because I would assume and maybe you can kind of riff on this a bit that they're starting to recognize because we have these methods of understanding and measuring the soil now, the soil health now, people are understanding that maybe certain practices are really bad for soil health and if they continue to do this, it's just gonna go down this really, really bad path and their bottom line will be impacted. So therefore they will then realize

there's an incentive to be more sustainable or do regenerative agriculture, whatever. Is that something that you, is how you kind of look at it too?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, that is both true. And that has been the case for a very, very long time. And it has not stimulated the sort of like long term solution decision making that we need. know, humans have shown over and over an incredible, incredible ability to pass the bag to our descendants, pass the bag contemporarily to people that live in other parts of today's world, right? You know, I grew up in a pretty white, wealthy suburb in New Jersey.

Cool.

Chris Tolles (15:08.502)
I didn't have any trash problems because somebody came and took the trash. I never thought like, where does the trash go? Right? Like trash goes someplace. So everything you just said is true. And because in our example, General Mills is at the end, relatively speaking of a multi multi-stakeholder chain of oats, simply because General Mills agrees with the theory that soil health is the foundation of its whole business.

doesn't mean it's willing to make a change in its approach today, right? A sourcing specialist at General Mills could understandably respond to me, hey, cool story, Chris, but like, to be clear, like, am I wrecked two years from now or 15 years from now? And of course, my answer is, hey, I think it's closer to the two year end of the spectrum. like, of course, I would say that I'm trying to sell you slow carbon emission services, Our ability to

put off to future generations and to current generations in other parts of the world is incredible. People of means will largely ask others to bear the burden of our decisions when it's in our economic interest to do so. So while I strongly agree that quote unquote climate companies that only serve a net zero goal are likely in trouble from a business model risk concentration perspective, the alternative is not like obviously more easy.

You I've already told you that our revenue from our VCM customers is larger than our revenue from non VCM customers. So I am, I have no regrets for that. We actively choose to participate in solar carbon VCM efforts because we know that they are a piece of the problem. But if it were as straightforward as you just described, right. My, revenue ratios would be flipped and they're not.

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Silas Mähner (17:21.793)
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That's earth r t h tech talent dot com forward slash contact. All right. Back to the show. Yeah. So how do you I mean if you I'm sure you've thought about this how do you think that we're going to be able to get people or get these bigger companies to see the direct correlation and start actually making a change like I don't know if this is how the VCMP comes into the picture or like how do we actually get a change to be made in the actual management process to improve soil health.

Yeah. So I don't know which of these options is going to hit, but I see a few different things that could be part of like the total momentum accumulating. One is the VCM itself. Like corporate net zero goals are not bad. They are in general, very, very good. My theory is that in the agricultural sector, companies that have a high quality net zero goal and pursue it,

through their agricultural supply chains rather than through carbon credit mechanisms that are unrelated to their supply chain, will be spending money today for the net zero benefits and will very quickly realize, wow, hey, I've got a more resilient supply chain. That's the sort of thing that I can sell to my operations department, right? Rather than my sustainability marketing department. And anybody that works in the sustainability net zero office, so to speak, of a big corporation knows

that what they want to do is they want to identify solutions that serve the core business rather than just, you know, quote unquote, only this, this VCM goal. So that's option number one. Option number two is there are specific types of crops that are more vulnerable and that will experience disruption sooner. There's a really beautiful analysis of this and I can find it and we can link to it in the show notes if you like. But if you imagine the X axis is number of acres,

Chris Tolles (19:44.546)
from small to large. And then the y-axis goes both negative and positive. The y-axis describes how will a given crop be affected by climate change. Climate change is complex, it's not a singular thing, nonetheless. In aggregate, over the coming decades, what will be the influence? Some crops will actually be helped, so there is a positive axis to the y dimension.

And that's because, for example, maybe you're taking a crop that right now is only growable in a small part of the world, but as average temperatures rise, maybe actually effective acreage could increase for that crop, right? And then the size of each bubble is the market size for each of these crops. I forget the numbers, but it's something like, you know, 70 % of our calories come from 15 crops. There's unbelievable concentration, know, rice, wheat, sorghum, etc. The basics. And what you see

is most of the dots are below the line. That means in aggregate, the yield of our land over the coming decades will harm productivity. There will be fewer tons, fewer bushels, fewer snacks, you know, of the major commodities. Overall productivity of agricultural land and therefore revenue from the production of that land will go down.

for people who was like, know, climate change is good for some people. there's some people trying to point out the positives, like, you know, me and Northern Wisconsin here, you know, we can get a longer season maybe, but yeah, exactly. At the end of the day, at the overall aggregate, it's going to negatively impact the, like the big, the large concentration. So I appreciate you pointing that out. You can continue. I just want to make sure I highlighted that.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that's really important to acknowledge. Like I think if, if climate storytellers, don't tell nuanced stories, we're going to get caught up in some of those exceptions. Right. and you know, people in, I don't know, Northern Wisconsin probably want milder winners every now and it may hurt the, I don't know, ice skating industry, but yeah. Right. Like net revenue will go up because more people want to be on nice lakes in Northern Wisconsin.

Silas Mähner (21:49.122)
sales are dead.

down from the loss. exactly. Snowmobile lobby is upset. pontoon boat lobby is excited. In aggregate, yes, this is really important that overall productivity will go down. therefore, kind of solution number two back to your actual question, sorry, is which of these crops will get nailed sooner, harder, faster? And as things are compromised, what will we attribute

No, this has a

Chris Tolles (22:19.692)
the problem too. So again, we can link to this in the show notes, but there was a both tragic and fascinating moment. I think this was spring 24, maybe spring 23. There was a big car accident in a major, was one of the ice states. I think it was Iowa. It was a big car accident because there was what many newspapers called like a dust storm. And a lot of agronomists and land managers, farmers in the area were like, this isn't a dust storm.

This is people who have destroyed the health of their soils and they're losing those soils in the wind because healthier soils are more likely to stick around, right? They're more moist, whole bunch of reasons why they're more likely to stick around. So it was interesting because, you know, and people died, you know, it was a serious car accident. was like really tragic. Dozens of cars involved, know, half dozen people died. And it was this really interesting moment where many people were like, what is the story we're telling here?

dust storm, you know, what the heck is a dust storm? How can you possibly prevent that versus over tillage of these soils is actually what caused it here. And again, I can link to it, but some really interesting like geospatial statistics on what are the rates of tillage tillage is the farmer word for plowing. I'm from New Jersey. There is a lot of farming in New Jersey. I'm not from that part of New Jersey. Tillage is is what I grew up calling plowing, which is very important agronomically, but does have

some deleterious effects of decreasing moisture, etc. So anyway, long story short, what's that story we tell, right? When cocoa collapses, do we say that it's because of, you know, political instability and Cote d'Ivoire, therefore they couldn't deploy, you know, good agronomy? Do we blame it on like, well, there are these random diseases that just happen, you know, or I think in some cases, are we going to rightly acknowledge that it is our way of managing soils, know, decrease soil health, and therefore like,

Yeah.

Chris Tolles (24:18.136)
Mars, Hershey's, Nestle's of the world are like, shit, there's not as much cocoa this year, which means chocolate prices go up. And at the end of the day, I don't know, do we care a lot about chocolate? Maybe not, but canary in the cold line, right? If all the chocolate in the world went away, I in New Jersey would be modestly affected. People in Cote d'Ivoire, people in Brazil, people in Indonesia would have millions and millions and millions of lives affected in very, very scary ways.

So that's kind of the second thing is as crises occur, what will we attribute it to? Will we rightly attribute it to our crisis of soil health? And can, you know, this is a long-term problem and a long-term solution, which means ultimately it's got to be at least significantly national policy decisions. Publicly traded corporations are not good at decadal scale commitments. It's just not what like capitalism is designed to incentivize.

So that's really the second, I think, opportunity is to realize that these early crises are coming for soy, right? If I'm in Iowa, I'm a soy farmer, it's easy for me to say, that'll never happen to me. don't live in Cote d'Ivoire, but like, soil health is a global phenomenon. Same way we share in atmosphere, right? We share a lot of soil dynamics.

Yeah. And then did you say there was a third option you think to be able to solve some of this and make the change?

There is. Yeah. And to be clear, this is the one that I believe the least in, but many people I really respect believe in it deeply. And so think it's really important to acknowledge, especially because some of my customers are committed to this solution and I honor them and I want to support them sincerely. And that's what's called like kind of the whole food solution of like, there is product differentiation, which will link to real customer demand. People vote with their wallets that I agree with generally. But the theory here is that

Chris Tolles (26:08.984)
Companies can differentiate by their commitments to whatever you want to call it. And this is where we get into all the marketing nonsense of these dumb ass words, but regenerative, right? Healthy soils, climate positive, blah, blah, blah. I fundamentally don't believe that consumer behavior will be a significant level of soil health climate impact. I would love to be wrong. Many, many people are totally committed to the idea that human consumer behavior can.

um, change the world like this. Um, there are glimmers of hope. Um, whole foods is out there, right? 40 years ago, all of it's didn't really exist. Um, so it's a, it's a non-zero solution in my accounting, but I treated as the third most likely way that we're going to have global scale simply because I just don't think that those purchasing priorities of humans are as high and sort of like the stack rank as, many other folks do. think we want taste and we want cheap.

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's like there are already so many decisions that the average person because of this information overload in our world right now, they have to make like they don't want to have to be sitting there deciding, you know, spending 20 minutes analyzing which lettuce to buy because of where it comes from. it's just, it's very impractical unless at some point, you know, the robots are doing our shopping for us and maybe they're programmed to take this into account. Great. That'd be cool. But I still think we're a little, a little far away from that.

So I really do appreciate the perspective. I think it could be interesting to see if this kind of crunchy moms movement does have some sort of political impact, which then leads to different policy, which could help change that. But it's not going to just be measure your carbon impact on the world and suddenly things are going to change because the consumers decide it's just not going to happen that way. So I definitely appreciate that perspective. I appreciate you laying those three things

Okay, we get the robots. How are gonna program the robots? We're gonna program them with our actual preferences, not our imaginary preferences. And our preferences are based on cost. And if you are considering between multiple lettuces, like, on, again, I am that category, right? There is a rich white mom thing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is where I normally live. That is an important part of the total puzzle. But golly day, if you're comparing which stamp on the lettuce,

Chris Tolles (28:32.174)
The one to choose. I don't know. Like, that's just not, that's not the fucking leverage that we need as a specie. Exactly.

Yeah, it's gonna be hard because you – it's very, very difficult to change something from being perceived as a commodity to that's not you know, like not a commodity. Like you're not gonna have like this vintage of, you vegetable is better than this one because it was grown – it's not gonna become wine at least not to – not unless the Italians get involved heavily. All right. And we're back. So, sorry for the interruption there, folks. So my next question to you is gonna be do you

fundamentally think that the framing of climate solutions kind of like from a political lens is actually like in itself a game over or like it's just a bad way to approach trying to solve the climate issue.

Well, back to one of the first things we talked about, like nothing is really fully good or bad, right? So in this case, for me, it's like, for whom? The marketing of yardstick as a climate impact company is unbelievably important to my employees. They are an important stakeholder, right? We have seven core values. The first one says climate impact above all else. Like a bunch of them work here significantly because they think on balance, like we walk the walk. And we ask them that.

Right? Like we collect data, whether they think we walk the walk and the world is complicated and nonetheless on balance. Yeah, they think we really do. So for some stakeholders, it's critically important for some stakeholders. It's anathema. I work in agriculture in America. I'm a change in America is a whole thing. Right. That said, it was, I think it was a fall of last year. I forget exactly when, but definitely 2024.

Chris Tolles (30:12.262)
like farmers drove their tractors to many of the major capitals of European countries because they were upset on to oversimplify like how climate policy and tax policy and land policy were influencing them. So as an American, it's easy to have this simplified view of the world, which is like American farmers are like dumb and racist and they don't believe in climate change and the rest of the world is God. it's like, no, like no one's that simple.

Farmers in America are not one constituency, right? Like anyone who has spent time in agriculture in America knows that they are as diverse a group of people as any that's that large. So all those caveats acknowledged, I don't think that many people's behavior, which is ultimately what we're trying to affect, is significantly influenced with averting climate catastrophe as a like top three priority, right? The point I just made about

food buying preferences I think holds for many of our behaviors. I am probably like top two percentile of Americans who are informed about the topic and like I eat a shit ton of beef and I love eating beef. I love it. It tastes good. And you know what? I got four little kids and like I just got to get them to eat like whatever the fuck I can get them to eat. And if it's a beef meatball, I'm going to feed them a beef meatball because at that moment like

You know, CO2e per gram of protein is just like not how I'm making decisions. So my commitment to orienting my life towards the flourishing of all people on earth, which includes acknowledging catastrophic outcomes of climate change is a real thing. Me feeding my kids beef meatballs does not invalidate my sincere beliefs that this is something worth devoting at least like a good chunk of my professional life to.

and you know what was the role of my here like galley dammit mcdonald's city cheeseburger like we stop screaming

Silas Mähner (32:06.638)
Yeah. One thing I just want to interject there is like you brought up this example of the dust storm, right? In Iowa. Before it's like, okay, if the news had pitched this as a climate thing because of, know, soil carbon issues, maybe if they had talked about soil carbon issues, that'd be just bad soil, that could work. But depending on how it's pitched, it's just going to come across as, oh, this is partisan in nature because now for some reason climate has become partisan. And as a result, people will just ignore it.

But if you can bring it in terms of like the disaster to their families, to their businesses, to their areas, that is different. And I think that this is the dilemma that we face is that the people who are really informed about climate want to talk about this is the reason they want to connect everything. And I'm not saying it's not connected, but you have to keep in mind that people who live, I think, I wouldn't say I grew up in this situation, but I lived in New York city and I understood what kind of, where people came from. Their view of the world is that certain things are

of the utmost importance because they have this very privileged position that they're coming from. But people in rural areas, that's not how they think because they don't see the same problems. They're like, hey, how can I not get all my taxes, get taxed so much? How can I keep the food on the table? Because it's not the same as living in New Jersey or New York City, right? So I think this is a huge issue with the messaging piece. I appreciate you sharing that.

Yep. And now to be clear, you know, yardstick started in like late 2000, and then into 2122. When like, perfect example, this is carbon removal, carbon removal was hot vocab for a lot of early stage venture investors in 21 and 22. Investors are one of my constituencies as well, right? They're a key stakeholder. So things that were attractive in one season become unattractive in another. That's the fun of marketing, right? That's just like the fun of storytelling for me. And

I think that shows up really acutely in agriculture because of the often oversimplified, but nonetheless directionally true thing that like agricultural producers in America, like have on average a more quote unquote conservative orientation have understandably struggled to get enthusiasm for this like abstract global geochemistry concentration problem.

Chris Tolles (34:24.565)
and instead are like, yeah, but you know, land is how I feed my family and I'm not going to touch the way I manage land if it would put my business at risk at all. To be clear, that's also where I see part of the opportunity. So our primary scientific collaborators and organization called the Soil Health Institute, and they joke with us all the time that like they're not called the Soil Carbon Institute for a reason. They have done a lot of amazing research that shows that soil health advancing practices, which on balance either,

preserve or restore solar organic carbon stocks, reduce emissions and increase profitability. So it's sort of like, which one do you want? Grab that one, like follow that, right? That's what's cool about a lot of solutions in agriculture is that many of the things that reduce emissions, restore and protect solar organic carbon stocks also reduce our reliance on synthetic, I don't like the word synthetic, but whatever, we've got to choose a word, synthetic. Back to Haber, right? Here we are back to Haber.

Do you want to spend a lot of money on fertilizer or do you want to have healthier soil? Duh, you want the latter. So the SHIs work is a very strongly evidence-based approach to saying we don't even ever need to talk about emissions. If we solve for soil health, there's a very good chance that we will simultaneously solve for the thing that land managers care most about, yield productivity, revenue, gross margin per acre, and we'll solve for emissions. And that's what's cool. That's what's really cool to me about soil.

So my question then is how do you – I mean this kind of goes into the regenerative agriculture topic in general. like how do you walk the line of still having mass production while improving soil health because I don't – I personally am a big fan of the idea of regenerative agriculture because like I said, both my parents grew up as farmers and I think industrial farming tends to just – it also wipes out the small farmers which is a whole other topic. But how do we kind of walk this line of improving the health while still having the production?

Yeah, that's the whole thing, you know, and I don't have a simple answer. Turns out there is not a simple answer. That's why we're not all doing it. But I will share some like, at least vocab that I find helpful. One is the premise of intensification. So so called industrial agriculture of the last hundred years has messed up a lot of things and it has made a lot of things like way, way, way, way better, right? Namely calories per acre.

Chris Tolles (36:45.826)
When you concentrate a shit ton more calories on an acre, the effective climate impact per calorie on average actually goes down. So when you compare, if you took a photo and I think some of this can often play in like classist racist tropes, but like imagine the original farmers on the Savannah, these indigenous tribes in Africa doing it this traditional way. Oftentimes that's.

marketed as attractive because it's so quote unquote natural. Unfortunately, a lot of the times a lot of those production systems are incredibly emissions intensive per calorie because they don't enjoy the benefits of a lot of the technology we've developed. So a lot of the like back to the land folks often benefit from the simplistic story of like, we just got to get back to where we were right before.

They never really say like what before. They never really talk about like how many of your kids survived to the age of 10 before.

It's just always an idealistic version of

Back before and I mean, and to be clear, this is like this cuts both ways politically. Like you have, you have many, um, very quote unquote progressive folks who are like, we got to get back to the way indigenous people have been doing it. Right. Like indigenous people invented all of these practices. A lot of that may be well and true and intensification of agriculture of the last 1500 years has been a miracle in terms of concentrating more food in less land.

Chris Tolles (38:19.276)
And that is really, really important as our population continues to grow. So I am of the belief that like the farmer's market will not save us. The definition of regenerative agriculture is elusive. you know, rarely does someone define it enough such that I could specifically agree or disagree with it. Instead, I think what I would say is we need solutions that simultaneously increase intensification, increase calories per acre.

increased nutritional content per acre, right? Cause calories are not the only thing that we, we, we, operate on. Yeah. Back to solution number three that I'm suspicious of. I always got to talk about my, my dear friend, Eric Smith who runs a company called a Dacious that's measuring nutrient density, right? This is his whole thing is like, it's not only calories, right? You can have a ton of calories and they're very low quality calories because they lack all these other important things that, that fuel our boteries. nonetheless, I think you would agree with me.

an agricultural transformation that reduces calories per acre is just not workable because there's no empty land left. Land that I perceive as empty, I perceive as empty because I grew up in New Jersey. People that live in that part of Arizona, they don't think it's empty at all. Filling it with the thing that I want it filled with is not necessarily attractive to them because it has other value besides calories. That's where I think this engineering brain

is both a really important part of the total land use economics puzzle and can really be derivative. I don't have an easy solution. Nonetheless, I think what I want to inspire people towards is a set of requirements as hard as it is that says we absolutely must increase intensification, not decrease it. And we absolutely must identify management practices that deliver those additional calories with

lowered emissions.

Silas Mähner (40:14.764)
Yeah, I really think that that's a helpful framework because if you can say, these core things like this, I guess you'd say this way of looking at each acre, that can then give people their own opinions or their own ability to just figure out how can we increase these and decrease these. Yes, it's metrics and there's obviously never perfect metrics, but it gives you a sort of idea on how you can go about that. And maybe there'll be, I'm sure, I'm not saying maybe, there will be other solutions out there that will work on that. That's good.

And that's also why I think within the agriculture kind of climate region community, as if that's even one thing, there's a lot of folks who are really violently against, for example, like, you know, CEA controlled environment, agriculture, like indoor agriculture. And it's like, I don't know, like all of these solutions have pros and cons, right? Like.

They laugh at CEA because you're neglecting the free energy of the sun. It's like, yeah, they do the same thing with all proteins, right? Like we've got all the protein we need right here and it's not the cow, it's the how. And it's like, it is the how. It's also the cow, my guy. Like we just can't afford these reductive simplistic solutions that say, reject anything that's hydroponic lettuce because God gave us land for a reason. Nor can the all protein people say,

We got to stop selling beef, you know? Like, it's not how human behavior works. And so my enthusiasm, we don't touch CEA, right? There doesn't tend to be much soil in CEA, so there's no soil carbon to measure. Even as it has nothing to do with yardsticks world, I'm like, hell yeah, we need all of these solutions because we're trying to blend this pretty wicked set of requirements. And I don't see anything out there that has like got that set of requirements nailed in one embodiment.

Yeah, and one thing just also to ask about and back up a little bit is you had said that it tends to be that the carbon I forget exactly the words used the carbon per acre, carbon per calorie is higher in regenerative agriculture methodologies. What's the main the main driver for that?

Chris Tolles (42:16.43)
I didn't quite say that and that's because regenerative agriculture is not one thing, right? So no one has like written that piece of literature. Usually what I'm comparing there is more intensive and less intensive production systems, which are usually contrasting higher income countries and lower income countries. So again, this gets like real racist real quick and xenophobic real quick, which is why I don't like this framing. But nonetheless, a common example will be like, let's look at beef in America from beef in Kenya.

right? Or like beef in Australia compared to beef in India. mean, maybe not a lot of beef coming from India.

So you're saying that they're typically measuring it based off of the region's kind of carbon production, not necessarily like the actual production aspect of it or how it's produced. just happens to be like, hey, Kenya doesn't have as many emissions as America.

way it's produced is highly correlated with where it is produced. If you go to a lower income country, the likelihood that they are drawing on the same technologies that the Midwest United States is drawing on is limited, right? And so Brazil is maybe a middle example where they have they are an incredibly sophisticated agricultural economy. And nonetheless, right, they're somewhere between Morocco and America in terms of their adoption of these technologies. Yeah. And since management, the way we work land,

and place are so highly correlated. Many of the studies that I'm referring to are typically looking at this at a national level. They'll compare, you know, CO2e per ton of beef from America to Kenya. They're not doing it one farm to another because it's really measured that precisely. And that's where intensification is usually the jargon.

Chris Tolles (43:57.854)
higher income countries, again, these are like broad strokes, all the like agricultural economists and development economists under podcasts are like screaming at me right now, but sorry, like you're in my headphones, I can't hear you. That's why it's often done at this level of like intensified agriculture has lots of problems. Nonetheless, in terms of like emissions per unit of food, tends to be a banger, tends to be really, really good. That's why we're doing it. That's why we're doing it.

I see.

Yeah. So one thing I'm always curious about with companies in your kind of like this, I would say somewhat of a niche space, how, what are the biggest factors?

Don't worry, you can call me a niche. This is my recreation. wish we were not a niche.

Exactly. What are the biggest macro factors that affect the market and affect the growth of your customer base or the growth of your business? What are the biggest players in the space and the biggest things that really move the needle or pull the lever?

Chris Tolles (44:50.37)
Yep. So one is that timeline question that I mentioned a little while ago. If I'm right that mega crises in supply chain are coming on the two year timeline, that will be bad for today's humans, but will be very good for the desire to adopt new technologies. Right. If all the homes burn down in LA, all of a sudden we're going to get serious about fire suppression, fire risk, et cetera. That's just like how humans act. So that's number one. I could be wrong.

Right? This could be a 20 year problem and not a two year problem. I don't really know at the end of the day. It's the future. Who the hell knows the future? On balance, I think it's more on the two end of the spectrum than the 20 end of the spectrum, but that's not important. It's like how quickly will it get way, way worse in places where there is money and desire, willingness to change, et cetera. Number two, which doesn't change very quickly at all is like, what are the buying preferences of humans?

This is back to why I think like solution number three is challenging to imagine is because like what people want just does not change quickly. A big part of why agriculture is so emissive is because as people's income goes up, they largely want more protein and they want that protein coming from beef. The only way to get more beef is to cut down more forests. It's like kind of that simple. If you could actually, you know, make a fake burger that tastes as good as a real one. Yeah, like you could probably get people to buy it more so far, you know.

Not even close. I love some of these products. You know, still I'm feeding my kids beef meatballs because it's what they'll put down. So that's number two. Unbelievably important, but humbly, I submit that it is very slow to change. And then three is the way other geopolitical macro factors influence agricultural supply chains. So for example, fertilizer, back to our boy Haber, his third appearance on the pod. Fertilizer.

is largely manufactured with natural gas. Natural gas only comes from certain parts of the world. Hypothetically, if those parts of the world are at war, you will have a cost problem with fertilizer. So again, oversimplification, but the war between Russia and Ukraine significantly increased fertilizer prices, and that cuts into the profits of agricultural producers. When you have higher fertilizer prices,

Chris Tolles (47:11.48)
Producers who believe that they have invested in soil health will be wagging their finger at their neighbors saying, ha ha, you're more exposed to those increases. Water has the exact same dynamic. Weather is incredibly unpredictable. Unlike consumer preferences, weather can change in ways completely discordant with our models of weather. At least two, three times a year, there is a drought somewhere or a extreme water event, a flood, a heavy rain somewhere.

And then all the region ag people are like, ha ha ha, my farm is fine in the drought because look how efficiently I use water. Or there was a flood, you know, flooding and they said, ha ha ha, I'm fine. My soils absorbed that flood rather than the runoff, you know, clearing the fertilizer and seed that I've, I've planted. so, that third category of like geopolitical, instability influencing agricultural inputs.

And then the fourth category of extreme weather influencing how people perceive soil health as being strategic or not. Those are the things that I think are really influencing our agricultural system at the highest.

Yeah. Okay, interesting. And so we're running out of time here, but I'll wrap up with a couple things here. What is, you know, when you have this situation where you have two kind of customers primarily and they're in relatively different mentalities or kind of buckets. Doing goals. How do you go about messaging your company? Do you just try to focus on the company, the customers that are the largest revenue share for you? Because I know there's a lot of companies in climate who especially as

they shift their messaging with the Trump administration being very anti-climate in the rhetoric. A lot of people like, maybe we'll focus on like a defense related thing and then we'll have the climate solution as well. Like, how do you guys go about that? And what is maybe your, I guess you could say advice to others on how to go about this public messaging. Not for the hiring pieces, right? But for the public message.

Chris Tolles (49:10.766)
Totally. So the difference between soil carbon and soil health is a lot more reasonable than a lot of the other messaging pivots that lot of other startups have considered. I don't think many people at YardSick would keep working here if there were a defense application. I don't think I'd want to run the company myself either. Some founders are excited by that pivot because of how they feel about armed forces, whatever. I have...

infinite respect for the people of our armed forces and largely have like low confidence in the system of our armed forces right now. And so I would probably if if that were the pivot facing guardstick, I would probably tell the board that they should find a different CEO because that's not me. And I don't know the politics of many of my employees, but I think a good chunk of them would be like climate impact above all else. It's literally number one. what the hell? And I'd go through the whole song and dance about like flexibility and tough times and I don't know, I just don't think it

you

Chris Tolles (50:04.238)
A perfect example of this is Tina Smith is a Senator, Congressperson? I forget. That's embarrassing. From Minnesota. And then a guy named Young from Indiana. Again, Senator, Congressperson. I can't remember. They have co-sponsored a bill for years now, and it used to be called blah, blah, soil carbon. And now it's called blah, blah, soil health. Carbon 180 has supported both versions of that bill. The content is the same.

him.

the acronym went from Arachi, SC, soil carbon to Aracha, soil health. I made my peace with that. You know, like, I don't know, I think there's a flip side of the like, I wouldn't want to run a defense company coin is like, flexibility is everything, you know, thankfully, in this case, the distance between soil carbon and soil health is actually quite small from a scientific perspective, which means I can feel integrous.

describing my company as measuring soil health. And I can describe why soil health is really important. The Biden administration didn't do a ton to support the voluntary carbon marketplace. So I think practically commercially for yardstick, there's not a lot of support that Trump can take away from the, it's voluntary in the first place. love voluntary, right? It's all carrots. And even then they're pretty small carrots, right? There's not many sticks. So I think the way I think about it and the way I encourage other founders to think about it is,

identify the application of your technology that helps someone make money or save money. That is what all businesses do. You either help someone increase revenue or decrease cost full stop for us. That shows up in both places, right? People make money in the voluntary carbon marketplace. Four or five years ago, many of our customers in the VCM were going vertical. Okay, great. That's where we're going to start.

Chris Tolles (51:55.872)
I have like self-compassion on our desire to focus on that piece of this segment, especially because I was starting the company. I don't have an agricultural background. Like what the hell do I know about General Mills and oats? Right? What the hell do I know about soil science? I've learned all of this on the job. That cuts both ways. I think I've led yardstick in some valuable, interesting, unique ways because of that. But that means I have mercy on myself for focusing on that noisy piece of the market, the VCM, which is nonetheless volatile. And

the way I advise, you know, mentees and I do executive coaching too on the side. So folks that I coach is like, what is going to be more durable? make money, save money. I don't think that yardstick is so over rotated on the VCM that like, my gosh, woulda, shoulda, coulda, we left this bigger opportunity on the table because of that. Hey, is it a two year problem or a 20 year problem rebuttal? You know, the general mills of the world, even though we're proud that we have them as customers, they're not like, here's a hundred million dollars yardstick, like go to the moon. It's still tough.

It's still emergent. But that's the most fundamental thing is like for your customers who are at the end of the day, the folks that are helping you figure out whether you've got product market fit or not. Very few of them are strictly economically motivated by the climate math. They're motivated by something else. What's their existing business? General Mill sells oats. Follow that.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. think if in your case, the thing I would just draw for people to listen to is that you found the kind of messaging that fits between them that is obvious to both customers, right? Carbons or soil health management effectively. Like it doesn't really matter. You can kind of change one word out for the sales pitch to one customer versus the other. And you've got a nice thing there. I'm sure that, you know, even if it is like a wider spectrum for other founders,

there's going to be something where it's towards the middle there if you really need to walk the line. But I do appreciate this because I think, again, we're seeing, I don't know, there's definitely some growing pains, obviously in the industry, but my general take is that even with all the negative stuff happening for the climate industry, if you will, the climate verticals, that it'll actually be healthy in the long term because it'll force people to make better business models. we will see way more.

Chris Tolles (54:05.582)
Oh, you don't have a bathing suit. That's embarrassing. I'm saying that in the mirror, right? Like I'm not talking shit at any other founder. Like maybe that's us, right? Maybe the tide is going out on yardstick as I speak. That's the nature of these systems. Like these markets all have cycles. To me, even as there are, of course, many things for my personal politics to be deeply concerned about in the new Trump administration from a like, oh, the climate sector's durability. I'm like, I don't know. It's discipline, right? Is your product cheaper?

Is it better? No? Then what the hell are you doing here?

Exactly. Awesome. Well, let's wrap things up. Any any announcements or any kind of calls to actions or last thought you'd offer people?

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm very sad we didn't have time to talk about the Europe topic but we'll have to have you out again. There's a lot of other questions I'd love to ask you, especially around hiring. I had a bunch of nice quips planned for it but we ran out of time. But Aries, thanks so much for coming on, Chris. This has been a pleasure. Thanks so much for tuning in, everyone. If you enjoyed this episode, please do share it on social media and drop us five stars on your favorite podcast platform. You everybody says this but it's actually very, very important because it helps us to rank up against those big guys who got tons of marketing budget. If you're a big fan of the show, give us those five stars.

Chris Tolles (55:28.686)
Thank you, I'll talk to you soon.

Silas Mähner (55:44.43)
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We always love to hear it because we're always trying to make the show better. Thank you so much for being a loyal listener and we'll see you next time on Clean Techies.