In this episode of Climate Positive, host Hilary Langer speaks with Aadith Moorthy, founder and CEO of Boomitra, a global soil carbon marketplace that pays farmers for adopting regenerative agriculture. Boomitra’s AI-powered platform uses satellite data to measure and verify carbon sequestration, turning healthier soil into long-term income for farmers. Aadith shares how attending a farmer’s funeral in India sparked the idea for Boomitra, how their marketplace is already increasing farm revenues, and when they expect to reach gigaton-scale carbon removal. A winner of the Earthshot Prize and a Time100 Next inductee, Aadith is helping redefine how we fight climate change—from the soil to the sky.
In this episode of Climate Positive, host Hilary Langer speaks with Aadith Moorthy, founder and CEO of Boomitra, a global soil carbon marketplace that pays farmers for adopting regenerative agriculture. Boomitra’s AI-powered platform uses satellite data to measure and verify carbon sequestration, turning healthier soil into long-term income for farmers.
Aadith shares how attending a farmer’s funeral in India sparked the idea for Boomitra, how their marketplace is already increasing farm revenues, and when they expect to reach gigaton-scale carbon removal. A winner of the Earthshot Prize and a Time100 Next inductee, Aadith is helping redefine how we fight climate change—from the soil to the sky.
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Episode recorded February 19, 2025
Chad: I am Chad Reed.
Hilary: I'm Hilary Langer.
Gil: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Guy: I'm Guy Van Sickle.
Chad: And this is climate positive.
Aadith: Now we were able to show something that is a results-based climate finance tool. Now you can name it carbon credits if you want to. You can name it carbon removal if you want to, but at the end of the day, it's actually a results-based climate finance tool. That enables carbon removal to happen at the scale that it needs to be
Hilary: After witnessing the devastation that climate change can have on small scale formers, Aadith Murthy founded Boomitra, a climate tech company that is transforming global agriculture. By harnessing satellite data and AI, Boomitra enables farmers and land owners to increase the carbon in their soil, boost their yields, and earn income through verified carbon credits. Aadith’s work has already won top accolades from Forbes, Time Magazine, and the coveted Earth Shot Prize. The Boomitra team’s momentum has set them on a path towards carbon removal on a gigaton scale.
Hilary: Great to have you on Climate Positive.
Aadith: Thank you for having me.
Hilary: We appreciate you joining from California, and as I learn more about Boomitra , it's just this amazing combination of agriculture and AI and a nice combination of your background. Can you give us the high level overview of what Boomitra does?
Aadith: Yeah. Boomitra works with farmers around the world to help them improve their soils. And improve their incomes through the generation of carbon removal credits.
Hilary: How did you come up with the name?
Aadith: RA means Friend of the earth in Sanskrit. I. That is who we are.
I had to put my thinking cap on and try to figure out what would be a good name for our company, what is it that we want to do? And I thought, yeah, well we all want to be friends of the earth, so we are boom, mire.
Hilary: I understand that inspiration for Boom Atra came during a visit to family in India.
Can you tell us about that trip?
Aadith: Yeah, about nine or 10 years ago I was traveling through a small village. In South India, and that is when I saw a funeral possession, a farmer had committed suicide. I learned, and it turned out it was because that year the monsoon rains had failed, and without the rains, the crop yields had collapsed.
And that got me thinking, why do farmers have to struggle so much? In the face of climate variability, which is especially increased in the age of climate change, and what is it that they can do to fight back? That is my thinking, and one step beyond that was what is it that I could do with my skills and my background to help them to fight back?
So that's where we started to work in developing satellite and AI based systems. To enable the measurement of various parameters like moisture, nutrients and so on, on the farms, to be able to help farmers to grow more with less. That's where we started, and then as time progressed. We were growing linearly, but you're not growing really exponentially at the rate that we should be growing.
If we wanted to really effect meaningful change to mitigate climate change, like what is the rate that you would have to do that you'd probably have to grow exponentially? And this is, as we all know, the crucial decade of action. It's even half past now, half of the crucial decades of action, which was the 2020s is like half gone and only half remain.
So it's like it's urgent to do things right now and to really. Move the needle on climate change. About five-ish years ago, we pivoted towards enabling farmers to participate in carbon removal projects. Where they do soil carbon sequestration from the improved activities and practices based on our systems that we were already recommending to them, but now it's packaged inside a carbon project.
And likewise, we also have satellite and AI based monitoring, reporting and verification just a fancy term for saying that we measure the soil carbon levels with satellites and AI and enable that to enable the monitoring of what the farmers are doing. Farmers of all sizes all the way from one acre to a hundred thousand plus acres all size and all between enable them to be a key part of the solution to climate change.
So we pivot into that direction and it's been a fast growth since then.
Hilary: So as part of that pivot, you went from having an app that farmers would actually pay you for to turning that 180 and now paying them for the work that they're doing. A
Aadith: hundred percent. We have flipped the business model compared to what it used to be originally.
We were trying to get farmers to pay us to get insights, but then we flipped that and then became, now we are in the business of paying farmers to enable them to sequester carbon and the clients who want carbon removal credits, either for voluntary or compliance purposes. They pay us by purchasing our carbon removal credits and then we pay the farmers.
So it's become a very different model. That has become a win-win win. It's a win for the farmers because they're doing great practices that improve their lands and earn them more money, both directly and also indirectly through their yields, improvements. It's a win for the clients who buy these carbon removal credits to increase positive environmental impacts that they're having and also for their sustainability trajectory.
And, it's a win for the planet. The planet is benefiting from all these different actions all put together, and that is what this flipping of the business model enabled us to accomplish.
Hilary: One of the hardest things about carbon sequestration and especially in agriculture and environmental resources is actually measuring and verifying the amount that is sequestered.
How have you been able to leverage AI to make that possible?
Aadith: Measurement is often one of the largest expenses that is associated with pulling off these types of projects. Making these projects happen requires significant investments in measurements in the conventional scenarios. In the case of agriculture, for soil, carbon agriculture, typically that means taking physical soil samples.
On a sufficient enough density on every farm, and then shipping them to a lab and having them tested. But all of that can add up quickly to more than half of the revenues that come from carbon credit generation from these projects. And thus, it becomes very much an infeasible thing to do at the scale that is necessary to really decarbonize on a planetary scale.
Now for us at Boom Itra, we have developed the innovations around using satellites and AI to really drive down that cost and to drive it down by not just an incremental amount, but by an order of magnitude compared to what it would be in the conventional scenario. Now we do not completely get rid of all soil sampling as of today because we keep some soil sampling for the primary purposes of ongoing validation and verification that our models and systems are working for, proving that they're working.
We have some ongoing soil sampling that is happening, but the amount of soil sampling that's required on that ongoing basis, order of magnitude smaller than what would be required in a. A conventional project that was purely doing soil sampling as its main way of measuring the carbon change. And this has many ripple effects in how we actually.
Structure our projects now that we can do monitoring at a much lower cost. It means multiple things. One of those things is that we can drive more money back to the farmers and back to the local communities. So in our projects. The farmers always receive the majority of the gross revenue of every project.
And note that I'm saying gross revenue, not net revenue. There's many systems out there where people might say, I will give you majority of the net revenue of what we are doing together, but it's not about net revenue. This is about gross revenue. It's about what actually comes from the clients. Gross revenue.
Majority of that goes back to the farmers. Our costs are not netted out before we give you the majority. Then likewise, the farmers plus the local communities get the vast majority of the gross revenue of the project. The vast majority is going to Farmers plus local communities, which includes our partners and other folks on the ground who are supporting us in these projects to operationally make them happen.
So that is the boom Itra model, and we are very proud that that is our model, and it's ultimately enabled by having a technology system and a carbon project development platform that enables us to do all of this at a much, much, much lower cost than was the typical status quo before. And as a result.
Have more cash going back to the farmers and landowners, and on the side of the clients, it means that we are able to achieve more scale. We can do things at a scale that was hard to imagine before. Supply the largest clients with the scale that they need to meaningfully buy carbon credits at, because a scale of just a few hundred tons or a few thousand tons, while that's like a pilot scale or an initial commercial scale, that's really not where emissions of, uh, major companies and governments are at.
They're in the millions and millions of tons. Or in the case of governments, it's actually the hundreds of millions of tons is major governments needs for carbon removal come in. So. We really need to operate at that scale. And actually we need to operate at a gigaton scale on a planetary level. And that's one of the goals for Boom Itra, is that over the course of the next decade, definitively get to a Gigaton scale even before that get to Gigaton scale.
So that's one of the, I. Key goals for boom are to begin with, and our technology enables that.
Hilary: And so walk us through what it looks like to get to those huge goals. When an individual farmer hears about Boomitra , perhaps from a neighbor or a friend, they decide to sign up. How do they then learn to allow their farm to sequester carbon and start practicing regenerative agriculture?
Aadith: So one thing that I typically tell folks is it's not. For me. To parachute in from Silicon Valley into your small village and tell you what to do. And I actually do live very close to where Silicon Valley would show up if you went to Google Maps and typed in Silicon Valley. So it's not appropriate for me to parachute into your small village from where I am and tell you what to do.
So we really focus on localized solutions that really work in that region, in that locality, and enable those solutions. To scale. Just because something is working locally does not automatically mean it's only a local thing. It cannot scale. That's not true. There are many local solutions that actually scaled really, really well, and we identify those.
We work in conjunction with nearly a hundred partners globally who support us on the ground in many different countries, in many different contexts. And these folks range all the way from folks like. The World Food Program of the United Nations, who supports us with the Farm to Market Alliance program in, uh, Kenya, all the way to, uh, large corporates like Yara and others who are in the crop input side who support us, or even one of Mexico's largest environmental NGOs, pro Naura or one of Argentina's largest environmental NGOs, Ave Argentinas, these major entities within each region.
Or even sometimes in a global scale, they support us and enable us to, uh, do the work properly on the ground in the way that it needs to be done. So Farmer, coming back to the farmer, the farmer hears about boom etra and gets the opportunity to sign on to. Alongside one of the representatives of one of our partners.
Hilary: Do they have to be paired with a representative or can they sign up independently?
Aadith: So that is the standard way. If we have like a decent amount of interest from farmers in a given part of the world where we have no partners, no representatives, we will actively explore how we can enter in that part of the world.
If there's a proper interest and it checks off all of our boxes that we have of what needs to happen, then we operate across like a dozen or so countries today. Already, and these tend to be major agricultural regions to where we operate today, but we plan to continue to scale to more regions as we continue our journey as a company.
So we will work to find the appropriate set of partners if necessary, but we really believe in that partnership first model where that's the way to do things in a manner that is sensitive to the local conditions, to the appropriate degree. There are folks that are the representatives with the partners who go out on the ground.
They're members of the local community, and when you have someone from your local community helping you to adopt regenerative agriculture, improved agriculture practices, it's much better for you to adopt. That's why I don't parachute in from Silicon Valley to complete the story. When you hear from your local trusted neighbors who are our representatives, in some cases that you.
Can benefit from doing improved composting and crop residue management, or improved grazing practices. You are more likely to adopt them than if it's some random group or individual from some far away place that comes and tell you the same. So that's why we really want to do things in a locally minded way with the right set of partners who understand the situation in their communities and do it in the proper way.
So that is what has actually gotten us to where we are today at scale of many millions of acres around the world that we are working with.
Hilary: I think that distinction is really important of making sure that it is the local solutions that are then coming forward and being brought to life.
Aadith: A hundred percent.
. Now we are able to show something that is a results based climate finance tool. Now you can name it carbon credits if you want to. You can name it carbon removal if you want to, but at the end of the day, it's actually a results based climate finance tool.
That enables carbon removal to happen at the scale that it needs to be. So we are actually trying to work with more aid agencies as well to show them that a results based model with this level of monitoring is possible and feasible. Could potentially help the $8 to go further and further and further, uh, maximize every bit of dollars that goes towards aid.
It could be done if it enabled projects like ours to happen. So that's even a different angle that we are trying to enable because results based climate finance, I. If it can be done properly, think about the commitments that countries made at COP 29, $300 billion a year to, uh, developing countries. Do we want that to end up like the toilets that you just mentioned where people don't actually use them?
I. Probably not. We need results-based climate finance to be front and center, and we hope that BOOM represents those cases and is able to work and to enable money such as the 300 billion commitment to actually, uh. Be effective.
Hilary: So tell me more about the results. What does the carbon sequestration profile look like when you first engage a farmer, and then what does it look like a couple of years on?
Aadith: Yeah, and this too is dependent on the local conditions and where the farmer starts from. Farmers start anywhere on a long spectrum. Practices. Some farmers are literally just getting started out with anything to do with, uh, sustainable agriculture, and they were not doing anything sustainable before, and it's the very beginning for them.
And those farmers actually have some of the largest initial sequestration from adopting practice because they start from a very low baseline. Then there are farmers who've already started to do some practices, but they've not adopted all the practices that they could possibly adopt. We help them to adopt more practices beyond what they've already adopted, and they move a bit further on that spectrum between few practices to many practices, the spectrum, they moved a bit, and then there's farmers.
At the very, very end of the spectrum, we're doing cutting edge science and for them. They have some small incremental improvements in soil carbon, but with the right new products, they're also able to get soil carbon sequestration, but it's much harder for them. But they're able to actually do something.
But since they're already starting from a point of significant knowledge and significant baseline, they're able to still do the right things. So there's a spectrum that is possible. But as you rightly mentioned, soil carbon change. Does plateau after a certain amount of time. What is that amount of time?
It varies by region. In some regions maybe it's, uh, 20 years for some region practice combinations, rather, some practices in some regions 20 years, some practice in some regions, 10 years. So there is a plateau that happens in soil carbon because the way to think about soil carbon is that it's like a equilibrium between inputs and outputs of carbon in the soil.
And as you do the good practices. Your input has increased beyond the outputs from the soil. Now, the inputs are higher than outputs, so there's a net gain in the carbon, but at a certain point, as you increase the carbon in the soil, the outputs also increase, and then the inputs equal the outputs, and you have a, a new equilibrium that is higher than the original equilibrium, but you reached it now.
You can either stop there and call it a day, but that's not what we prefer. That's not what boom and throw encourages. We want everyone to continue to push themselves and go to the next level. Next set of practices continue to improve. Why stop? So we actually have what is probably one of the first in the industry actually is a.
Carbon hacking team. So we have an internal team, which I kid you not, is called the carbon hacking team.
Hilary: I love that.
Aadith: And one of their key goals, how do I enable my farmers to continue to sequester carbon this year, next year, the year after, so on for 20 years. What is the series of actions that they need to take?
That is the question that the carbon hacking team is answering on an ongoing basis, they have to answer this. So they're involved in researching new types of practice that could be done, researching what practice have already worked for some subset of farmers and can be scaled. All sorts of questions of that variety so that we can enable more farmers to succeed.
Because when the farmers succeed with their carbon sequestration, not only do they both improve their soil health further and they also improve their yields, but they also get more carbon removal credits, which benefits them, of course, directly in cash, but also benefits Boomitra, Inc. In cash. So you see how our values are aligned.
We have our own motivations, but our motivations are aligned with enabling the farmers to sequester more carbon because we make more money than the farmers also make more money then. So with all these properly aligned motivations and incentives. I think that is how we win.
Hilary: It's great how that initial business pivot has enabled all of these incentives to align.
Aadith: Exactly.
Hilary: How are the farmers compensated? Is it based on the additionality of the carbon that their lands are sequestering?
Aadith: That's correct. The farmers are compensated based on the amount of carbon that they sequester in the time period that they're working with us and the amount, and furthermore, the added nuances that.
How much of that amount is additional compared to what would've happened otherwise? So if you are a farmer who, uh, continues on the same trajectory for 10 years, and I've been doing the same thing for the 10 years before joining our project, you don't really have anything that's additionally happening that enables carbon to be sequestered.
But Nan, you have to continue to improve, adopt more things, and then you start to diverge from your baseline. As you diverge from your baseline scenario, then you generate carbon credits. So the farmer does have to do additional things that enable them to sequester carbon, but anything that they do sequester after that, it's an outcomes-based program that we do.
You are. Paid for your outcome. We don't pay farmers by just what practice that they did and so on and so forth. We pay based on the very real outcome of how much carbon has been sequestered. That incentivizes everyone in the proper way. It incentivizes us to ensure more carbon sequestered. It incentivizes the farmer to ensure more carbon is sequestered and so on.
Hilary: And what does that look like given climate variability and the changes in weather? Are there years when the farmers will not receive carbon credit compensation?
Aadith: Yeah, that's a great question. So it is, in most cases, farmers receive continuous compensation because of variety of different drivers that fit into our program.
On a more of a higher level programmatic basis. One of them is just from the pure technical perspective and scientific perspective. Yes, in years when there's drought and not drought, there's fluctuation in how much you can sequester that happens in that year. Now that said, how the actual carbon grid is calculated is based on analyzing.
Either a physical control site or a synthetic control site that is modeled out using modeling of how the business as usual scenario for that farmer would have been. So if you are doing better than a controlled site, either physical or a virtual synthetic one that is modeled out, then you are always generating credits and when there's a drought, this modeling of the business as usual scenario, I.
Is also affected. The business as usual scenario also fluctuates. When there's a drought under the synthetic or physical control site, you would see that the carbon there has also been impacted in a similar manner. So to a certain extent, these changes do cancel out to a certain extent between the project and the baseline scenario.
Now, for any residual changes that do remain, it's another programmatic aspect of our program that's important to note is that we actually. Do ongoing payment vesting to the farmers. Now, what that means is if the farmers actually earn a certain amount of money this year from carbon sequestration, our agreements with the farmers.
Actually have that amount of money vesting over a period of time, and that period of time can be like three, four, or five years. But these vestings actually stack up over time. So example, if I have a hundred dollars that I receive this year that stacks up over a given period of time, then I receive a hundred dollars in next year for sequestration next year.
That also stacks up over a similar period of time, and you get the idea as you add up these stacks, you eventually end up with a hundred percent of the money going to the farmers every year. A few years into the project, not initially, but a few years into the project, you end up with that scenario. And when you are in that scenario, even if you did not sequester carbon this year, as long as you are compliant with our program and continuing to do the practice necessary, you'll receive some capital actually from the previous amounts that have not been vested to you from the previous years that comes to you.
So this vesting that we use, it enables the. Payments to become much smoother to the farmers over time. The effective payment that you receive in a given year is much smoother. It's much less affected by climate variability. There is some effect, I'm not saying there's no effect, but it's much less affected.
It's not like zero to a hundred to zero or something.
Hilary: That's such an elegant solution to this huge problem that farmers face.
Aadith: Oh yeah.
But that said, when farmers do sign up with us. We all do acknowledge that carbon credits are sort of like the cattle market or the grain commodity market.
It's subject to fluctuation. It's not like it's any different from you growing. Wheat one year, and then discovering that the wheat yields are terrible one year, like things are subject to fluctuation. The farmers appreciate that because they've dealt with that for generations. They know what that means to have market risk and also just climatic risk for them to grow their product.
They know all of that already, but these other aspects make our program pretty attractive for the farmers anyway, but everyone is aware that it's a market and it's also. An open outdoor system, as is regular farming and regular yields, so people understand that.
Hilary: And the carbon credits are not just based on boome ratings and your models, but they're actually verified by a third party.
Can you tell us about that? I.
Aadith: Certainly the carbon credits are generated based on the processes that we have set up, but they all conform to internationally recognized third party standards. So right now we have five projects that have been third party validated under the verified carbon standard, or Vera, which is.
One of the leading global standards, and we have a few other projects in other standards, and they're both targeting the voluntary markets and compliance markets. Vera is mostly oriented towards the voluntary markets, although they're also trying to expand into compliance markets at the current moment, and very recently, as in just on February 18th.
We actually had our, uh, first Vera project complete its full registration approval, uh, from Vera.
Hilary: Congratulations. .
Aadith: Thank you. So that, that's a very important milestone for us because this is the first project in the world that uses. Soil carbon, uh, remote sensing. And it's also one of the largest projects in the world in terms of carbon removal output and also in terms of raw size of the project because it's more than a million acres in size.
And altogether, this is a huge achievement for us because now. It paves the way for all of our other projects to also complete the registration process. And for your listeners who might not be aware of what is all this lingo, what is registration? What is validation? What does it all mean? Validation. The first thing that you do when you go to a third party standard is actually list a project.
And the list project is just sits on the registry as something that is a proposed project. Then once you have some amount of traction and understand the systems within the project, you get the systems within the project. Validated. So there's a project design document or a project document that is developed that details the process in the project, and that gets validated by third party auditor.
And then you submit all of this information with the current status of the project to the standards body, for them to double check that the validation was done correctly, and go through all of those details more meticulously, which is called a project review. From the standard side and once the project review from Vera is complete, and once both the audit from the auditor and the comprehensive project review from the Vera side are completed.
That's when the project is registered. So just the audit is just the validation of the project, but then after that, you have to actually pass a long project review from the standards body before they will officially say your project is compliant with the Vera standard and meets all the methodology and requirements and all that.
It's a major hurdle. It's like getting. FDA drug approval or something. It's a major thing for us to be able to have accomplished that and we are happy that it has finally happened and it also paves the way for our many other projects to achieve that similar milestone and be able to issue credits on the leading registries.
Hilary: Well deserved validation. I. You've been attracting attention for years. At the end of 2023, you won the climate solutions category for the Earth Shot Prize, which is kind of like the Oscars of environmental work and hosted by Prince William. I understand that he has quite a poker face. What was the awards ceremony like?
Aadith: Actually, on the day of the award ceremony, we had the opportunity, all of us finalists to actually. Briefly speak to Prince William in the morning and to kind of paint the scene here. The award ceremony actually happened in Singapore and we had a meeting with Prince William in the morning of the award ceremony at the Gardens by the Bay, which is a very fabulous area in Singapore.
And while we were there sweating away in the hot sun in Singapore, the prince came to each of us and had a brief conversation. And when he came to me. It didn't seem like he remembered me that well. It wasn't clear that he remembered what we were actually doing or anything. And the reason why that is concerning, let me tell you, is the Prince actually chairs the Final Award council that selects the winner.
Now, the finalists are all selected by a committee of experts that are from all sorts of different fields that the Earshot Prize has assembled, but the final winner.
Hilary: And I should note this is incredibly competitive. You've got over 1300 who have already gotten to the nomination phase, so the fact that you're even there is remarkable.
Aadith: That's right. So 1300. Solutions, or 1300 organizations and initiatives are nominated. You need to be nominated for this award by an official nominator. You cannot apply yourself, so you need to be nominated. 1300 are nominated, and from that 1300, they have many expert committees on every single sub-sector that exists.
And the expert committees go through and then. Weed it all down. After all of the expert rounds, they end up with 15 finalists and there are five categories for their chart price, which include all the way from waste to climate action, which is the one that we won. So we were there with my fellow, 14 other finalists, US 15 finalists.
We were talking to the prince in the hot sweltering sun, and he didn't seem to remember me, but he seemed to remember some of the other finalists. Way better. That made me feel, I. Like those were the people who won because the prince, he clearly knew who won. He chairs the prize council that selects the winner, so he clearly knew who won, and it didn't seem like he knew me so well.
So I had assumed that we did not win. So it was a huge surprise when I actually went to the award ceremony and they called out and the winner is Bo Mitra. Huge surprise, huge surprise to actually hear that. And the rest is history, of course. But we did meet with the Prince after the award ceremony, and he told me that he had to keep a poker face in the morning because he couldn't give away who had actually won so early.
So that's why he appeared a bit cold. He claimed because he needed to keep that poker face. Otherwise it would not have been fun. But the fun for who? It is not fun for me.
Hilary: He could have just given you a wink at some point. Yeah. How has winning the Earth Shot Prize changed your ability to attract financing and expand?
Aadith: It's definitely helped. The Earth Shot Prize is building a globally recognized brand around the world, and as you said, it's like the Oscars of climate. So it's been definitely somewhat of an acceleration since then.
It enables you to get your foot in the door with a lot more people than we were doing before. It also helped us, I'm sure to be named as one of the time, 100 most influential companies, probably. Last year we were also named one of the by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential companies, and last year I was also named personally to the Time 100 Next, which is the next 100 most influential leaders in the world.
Hilary: No pressure.
Aadith: Yeah, I'm sure all of these things have been building on top of themselves and it has definitely helped us for sure with connecting with more clients and to connect with more. Partners and with more investors. And now with us completing this registration process, which is like similar to A FDA approval for our project.
Figuratively, I think we are very nicely set for continued expansion of our company, and that's what we intend to do.
Hilary: You are currently very geographically broad in where you operate. You're in four different continents and you have millions of acres around the globe. You've stated that you aim to capture a gigaton of carbon in soil, or 3% of the total amount of carbon that humans pump into the atmosphere every year .
How are you going to capture that exponential growth?
Aadith: I think we are at a very unique position right now where we have the necessary resources to actually think that big. It's one thing to just throw out random numbers, but it's another thing to actually have the strategy and the execution to really do it.
There's a lot of execution to be done, and of course we are working the Boom Andra team. The Boom Andra family, as we say internally, is working super hard on the execution side to make it happen, but more generally, in order to reach that level of scale, you really need the support of the largest companies and countries in the world, and that's what we are building towards.
We do work with many large companies right now. The next unlock is to do work with even more large countries around the world, and we have some country spanning carbon projects. Literally right now. As we announced some months ago, we did a partnership with the government of Mongolia, for example, convert huge spots of that country into a carbon project that can supply compliance units to other countries.
Or likewise, we have some country spanning initiatives. In, uh, places like Costa Rica and beyond, but we wanna do more of those at the country level, and that's the next level of unlock for us to really scale up from millions of acres today to many tens of millions of acres in the future, and then get to the a hundred million.
Plus acres range, and that's where we come into striking distance of the gigaton. And that will be only plausible through the right partnerships. Again, partnerships with the right governments and corporations and large networks that's necessary. And we are already on the course to do so, but it takes significant execution from our parts.
To actually make it happening. But we are on. We are on that trajectory.
Hilary: That's fantastic. It seems like you've got the ground fork in place. Anything else that you wanna make sure we share before we switch over to the quick hot seat questions?
Aadith: May maybe one thing, soil carbon has often been sort of a misunderstood climate solution.
When people think typically about carbon removal. The first two things that come to your mind are probably, let's plant a tree. If you think about more from the nature perspective, or you think, let's go build a dirt air capture plant, that'll do it for us at a thousand dollars per ton price tag, that's probably some of the first things that come to mind.
Soil carbon is probably not one of the first things that comes to mind, but soil carbon is probably one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal. I'm not saying. We should not have any other tools. All tools are necessary. It's all hands on deck to solve the climate crisis, but soil carbon is one of the very powerful among those tools because you don't need to displace any land.
You can improve yields, you can improve farmer outcomes, and you can do all of this international development work like this, results based development, finance. And climate finance while achieving carbon removal in a scalable manner. And there's enough land area on this planet to actually make a sizable dent on climate change.
And now with our systems, with our satellite and AI based MRV, things can be done in a more precise, repeatable, and accurate manner that enables carbon sequestration through soils to really become that gigaton scale solution. That it has the potential to be. So that is what we need to make happen. How can soil carbon be one of the great climate solutions?
Because it has the clear potential, but it requires efforts. It requires efforts from all of us. It requires efforts from ROS side. It requires efforts from the farmers, but we can make it happen and we can make it happen effectively.
Hilary: I'm really glad you added that, so a good point. Wrapping up, we'll move to the hot seat questions.
The first is, given your musical background, what is a favorite group or artist on your current playlist?
Aadith: I personally, I sing Indian classical music. Actually. I'm trained in singing Indian classical music, which has a multi. Millennia history actually in different parts of India, both in North India and in South India.
But I'm personally South Indian, so I sing South Indian classical music, which is also known as tic music. Coming to all other types of music, I generally enjoy. All sorts of genres throughout the spectrum, probably with the exception of metal. I, I find metal a bit hard on my ears. I know probably some of the listeners disagree with me, but I personally find it a bit hard on my ears and can't really stand it.
So I, I enjoy a variety of different artists in a variety of different genres. I had the very cool experience of, uh, meeting one Republic, actually. It is also at the Earth chart prize award ceremony, actually.
Hilary: Oh, that's fun.
Aadith: And uh, they're one of my favorite top groups, but that is a very interesting experience.
And at that time I also managed to meet. Dan from Bastille, which is another very cool group. So just working in climate doesn't mean that you're just doing climate stuff. You get to do other interesting stuff as well. Every now and then as part of your climate activities.
Hilary: It seems like that day really took a turn from sweltering and feeling ignored in the morning to then meeting all these musicians and princes.
Oh yeah. I am most proud of.
Aadith: I am most proud of our boom Mitre family. What our boom Andre team has accomplished. And now when I'm referring to boom through family, I don't just say just our employees and team members, but I am referring to all of our partners and all of our farmers. It, uh, really takes the work of many, many, many, many people to get things to where they are now.
Now, I know at the very beginning of this conversation before this interview, you were joking of how do I get any time to do anything? How do I sleep? How do I make all of this happen? Well, the reality is we have an awesome boom metra team, an awesome boom metra partner network, and an awesome network of farmers and ranchers and landowners who support us day in and day out, and I'm so proud of what they have all accomplished.
Hilary: That's fantastic. When you have time to recharge you,
Aadith: I enjoy going on random runs to different areas around the place where I live and check out different places I've never seen before. Just random runs, run six miles or something like that.
Hilary: You're in a good part of the world for that
Aadith: certainly.
Hilary: Advice you've taken from a mentor.
Aadith: The best advice that I've probably received from a mentor is to never give up. It can be very hard when you're an entrepreneur and there's many naysayers and there's many, there's many challenges with being an entrepreneur.
Some people have said it's like eating glass, but that's actually true. But not every day is like eating glass. It's a roller coaster ride. Some days it's great. Some days it's really, really bad. But the grit, the determination to succeed, that's such an important thing. And I sometimes need these external feedbacks to actually even keep me going because this is a really hard journey to be on, and most people probably don't talk about all of these challenges that they face.
But we have faced a good deal of challenges. But the question is how you surmount them and make real change happen. Achieve the goals that you set out to achieve. Don't look away from your goals.
Hilary: And then finally, idith. To me, climate positive means
Aadith: to me, climate positive means reaching the gigaton scale and blasting beyond the gigaton scale because we really need to do things.
At that scale in order to truly move the needle on climate change. Now, of course, all of us can do our own stuff, like take fewer flights or uh, eat vegetarian or things of that nature. I. We really need to also think in terms of gigaton scale, how do we do activities at the scale necessary to truly mold needle on climate change is the need of the hour and that's what climate positive means for me.
It's not sufficient to just me being vegetarian and take fewer flights, not sufficient. For me, scale is what makes it climate positive.
Hilary: Fantastic. Thank you so much for talking with us and we're really excited to watch you grow and get that gigaton.
Aadith: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week's podcast, please leave us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. It really helps us reach more listeners. You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter at Climate pai pod, or email us at climate positive@hasi.com. I'm Gil Jenkins and this is Climate Positive.