Additional Information
Biography
Agriculture is both one of the largest sources of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and one of the largest potential sinks for carbon sequestration on our planet. The negative environmental impact of conventional agriculture grows alongside our population. Without an Agricultural Transition, achieving reductions in global GHG emissions may be impossible, and we will continue to see biodiversity loss and degradation in water quality and availability. If, however, agriculture shifts to sustainable and regenerative practices, we can feed a growing population while restoring our planet.
Vayda’s mission is to accelerate agriculture’s transition to regenerative farming practices. We provide tech-enabled agronomic decision support and market access to farmers who are transitioning from conventional carbon-intensive and environmentally harmful practices to carbon negative production that restores agricultural ecosystems. Our approach is farmer-first, designing transitions that sustain yields while growing farmer profitability, thereby unlocking widespread adoption.
Through rigorous experimentation on large-scale farms, we have achieved significant reductions in chemical input usage while at the same time observing meaningful increases in agricultural yields, delivering tremendous improvements in profitability to the farm. Our work has delivered major enhancements in the natural water-holding capacity of soil (reducing the need for irrigation), and we have observed the accumulation of tens of thousands of tonnes of soil carbon from CO2 sequestration. By the end of this year, we estimate we will increase this impact by a factor of 20, by bringing our solutions to partner farms. By the end of 2024, we hope to achieve impact across nearly half a million acres of farmland in the US.
