“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is a well-known expression, and one often applied to nature and climate action, since a failure of measurement has contributed to the environmental crises we face.

Mitigating the environmental impacts of food production, for example by creating nature and biodiversity markets, or designing policy incentives for environmentally-friendly farming, would benefit from some measurement of relevant activities and outcomes.

At New Food Finance, our focus is driving a green transition in food production. We have created a taxonomy to define this transition, including relevant sectors, sub-sectors, markets and technologies.

Monitoring reporting and verification (MRV) is an example of our 500 markets. We have disaggregated MRV into monitoring of regenerative agriculture, carbon, regulatory compliance, biodiversity and soil health – see the Chart above.

Our database shows that these MRV companies collectively have attracted $428 million to date. Following are examples of companies leading this space:

• Regen Ag MRV – Example – Hummingbird Technologies uses satellite-based remote sensing to enable large-scale detection of regenerative practices, including planting of cover crops, a diversified rotation and no-till versus conventional tillage ($43.1m to date).
• Carbon MRV – HabiTerre specialises in the quantification of soil organic carbon (SOC) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, to inform and predict environmental and productivity performance. ($1.3m to date)
• Compliance MRV – Farmeye says that it measures and verifies soil nutrients, to allow farmers to measure, monitor and demonstrate the sustainability metrics of their farms, including compliance with requirements to make soil management plans. ($0.4m to date)
• Biodiversity MRV – Descartes Labs is a wholly-owned government subsidiary which uses satellite imagery, weather, market data, land use data and artificial intelligence, to monitor land-use changes, including tracking carbon emissions and biodiversity losses. ($59.8m to date)
• Soil health MRV – Trace Genomics provides soil analysis with metagenomics sequencing, measuring the soil’s microbiology as well as chemical compositions such as carbon levels. ($55.2m to date)