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Australian soil carbon project developer and solutions provider AgriProve has acquired the Geora technology platform in a strategic move aimed at helping Australian farmers better track the carbon footprint of their crops.
AgriProve, which represents the bulk of registered soil carbon projects on the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme, says the acquisition will help it streamline access to soil carbon projects for farmers and help them take the guesswork out of practice changes.
Founded in 2016 by Bridie Ohlsson and Cadel Watson, Geora operates a platform that provides a record of ownership for agricultural commodities with the capability of monitoring the quality of crops and trace them along their respective supply chains.
The Sydney-based company, which is backed by Tenacious Ventures Management, Flying Fox and NAB Ventures, describes itself as the “global leader at the junction of blockchain and agriculture”.
The purchase price paid by AgriProve has not been disclosed but Geora raised $1.5 million from a seed round in 2022 from its three key investors.
AgriProve, which is headquartered at Albury in regional NSW, says the combination of its soil carbon expertise and Geora’s deep-tech nature and climate intelligence engine will help AgriProve provide customised, predictive insights to help Australian farmers future-proof their land management.
Geora currently provides farmers, agribusinesses and financiers the technical tools to run risk and impact assessments across agri-supply chains.
Along with emissions estimates and AgriProve’s soil carbon predictions, the merged platform is aiming to become Australia’s leading farm insights engine for natural capital management.
“This is a win for all Australian farmers,” says Matthew Warnken, founder and managing director of AgriProve.
“We believe farmers can lead the way in solving our food production and climate challenges without being penalised. Current tools and models are ill-equipped to solve this at a value chain level and are often at the expense of farm gate revenue.”
AgriProve says it is now able to provide farmers with real-time insights, emissions integrity and credentialling, innovative funding models, and a pathway to carbon sequestration. This will allow farmers to focus on improving soil health and farm productivity while AgriProve provides the transparency financiers and customers seek in terms of carbon tracking.
“It’s not just about knowing your ‘number’, it’s about how farmers can improve it to generate value,” says Stuart Upton, general manager of AgriProve.
“This technology takes the guesswork out of managing natural capital and ultimately helps farmers build better soil, better land and better profits.”
In announcing the sale of the business, Geora’s founders have described AgriProve as a “robust home for our tech, with boots on the ground, and a quantity of soil sample data that gets our inner geeks very excited”.
“We realised early on that Geora and AgriProve share a vision: to build better farms, better profits, and better nature and climate outcomes,” Ohlsson and Watson say in a blog on the Geora website. “What we have approached with technology, they have come at with soil science.”
Ohlsson, Geora’s CEO, says the platform was built “to bring trust, transparency and forward-thinking solutions to shift the way that individual farms are rewarded within agricultural systems”.
“Technology is really powerful when it helps farmers to model potential futures and better act on risks,” she says.
“By joining forces with AgriProve, we’re excited to continue building incentive models that help farmers make data-driven decisions around soil health, boost impact integrity, and stop the erosion of farm profit margins.”
AgriProve represents about 75 per cent of all registered soil carbon projects on the ACCU Scheme with its customers currently sequestering more than 185,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide through soil carbon projects. This is projected to generate more than 25 million carbon credit units by 2040.
“Farmers need access to a diversity of ways to be recognised and rewarded for their nature-positive practices,” says Matthew Pryor, managing partner at Tenacious Ventures.
“With the addition of the Geora platform to AgriProve, Farmers now have more ways to see significant financial and production benefits when they are investing in climate-improving on-farm practices.”
AgriProve’s new platform launches tomorrow on World Soil Day.
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