How crushed rocks can remove carbon and boost crop yields

A Q&A with Noah Planavsky, Professor of Geochemistry at Yale

This episode originally aired on May 5, 2026. Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.

The Earth naturally removes a billion tons of CO₂ a year through a process called rock weathering. What if we could find a way to scale it?

Yale geochemist Noah Planavsky joins me to talk about how enhanced rock weathering helps remove more carbon from the atmosphere, all while improving crop yields and financially benefiting farmers. It’s an amazing example of how we can continually learn from what nature already shows us, and build for a better future.

Interview Transcript:

Steph
Before we dive into the technology, I want to get your perspective on what the world could look like if we get enhanced rock weathering, commercialized globally.

Noah
Enhanced rock weathering. Enhanced weathering is most obviously going to scale in agricultural settings. One of the reasons why it has potential to scale is, is something that already ties into existing practices in farming. If this would scale to farmers all over the world, the world would look in some ways very similar to how it does today, except farmers would have better yields, better nutrient use, efficiency. The process of adding amendments to soils has a carbon aspect, but also has an agronomic aspect or a benefit to farmers.

Many clean technologies you imagine transforming Earth’s surface in a very noticeable and very obvious way. This is one where it is, instead, utilizing the massive amount of infrastructure that we have in agriculture to bring and scale up an existing practice. If you imagine perfect soil management everywhere in the world, what would that look like? One of the things that hopefully that would look like is the same sort of yields we have without the massive amount of nutrient pollution that comes from our food system right now.

Steph
And if we had that, then people would be healthier and there would be more flourishing ecosystems and we would have a better livelihood. So can you tell us a little bit more about how enhanced rock weathering works?

Noah
If soils get too acidic and soils will naturally accumulate acid? The biggest component of that is, these days is the fertilizer that farmers will have to add to give sufficient yields. So in order to deal with that acid, you add crushed rocks. A quarry is producing a fine grained rock. In many cases, you can actually utilize waste products that come from producing aggregate, that goes into roads, that goes into buildings, and that is transported to an agricultural field and spread, ideally prior to the fertilizer being added.

Ideally in a time when there’s no crops down on the field and that reacts with the natural acid and the CO₂ that is in soils, to transfer CO₂ from the atmosphere into a dissolved form that’s carried away in rainwater, which flows into ground waters. And ultimately, in most of these cases the atmospheric carbon that’s transferred into waters is stored in the oceans. And once that carbon is in the oceans, it’s stable for thousands of years and eventually is stored for millions of years.

Steph
And this is a natural process that already takes out one gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere now, naturally, rocks absorbing carbon. And you’re talking about taking crushed rock, putting it over soil. And when it rains, the carbon in the atmosphere being absorbed by those rocks and being taken away to rivers and oceans, which is magical, actually.

Noah
Exactly. The Earth is habitable as a planet because of this process. We roughly remove billion tonnes of CO₂ because of this process naturally, because of CO₂ interacting with rocks. If this process wasn’t happening, the Earth would be much, would be very, very CO₂ rich and probably uninhabitable. Rock weathering is our Earth’s natural thermostat. So it’s it’s really taking what is a a fundamental aspect of how our, our planet naturally works. And it’s just trying to speed that reaction up and doing it in places where there is co-benefits of that process for farmers, for global food security.

But it’s important to note this basic concept - that rocks are going to combine with CO₂ and can transfer atmospheric CO₂ into stable carbon stored in the ocean - That’s something that actually can occur in a lot of settings. So one of the ones we’re really excited about is wastewater treatment plants that can have some benefit to wastewater treatment plants and is an ideal location to do this, because wastewater treatment plants are full of carbon from from waste. You can do this. It can occur on roadsides. It can occur in people’s lawns. It’s something where agricultural settings are the easiest way to scale massive portions of this. But the basic idea is something that is transferable to a wide range of different settings and sectors.

Steph
And that’s game changing, because the Paris Agreement says that we need to get to ten gigatons of carbon removed by 2050. And I understand that enhanced rock weathering could get to 2 to 4 gigatons of carbon removed annually by 2050, if scaled up correctly. Is that right?

Noah
It’s always important when talking about carbon dioxide removal to note that this is not meant to be a substitute for emissions reduction to meet climate goals. First and foremost, the main thing we need to do is reduce emissions as quickly as possible. And if we want to meet our climate goals, if we want to keep to a max warming of two degrees, we have to remove billions of tons of CO₂ on top of that world that we have internationally agreed upon is our target.

Steph
And because we as a planet have overspent our carbon budget and are spewing more carbon into the atmosphere than we are supposed to. There are really three legs of the climate crisis actions toolkit, which is, like you say, mitigation, adaptation and removal. And so if you’re looking at all these different types of carbon dioxide removal technologies, how do you place enhanced rock weathering amongst the other solutions for carbon dioxide removal? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of it?

Noah
A few that I have is we should be focusing on things that also have the potential to help communities and provide clear benefits as well. So enhanced weathering can be deployed in many areas. One of the areas where it can be deployed is also working with smallholder farmers, working with low income farmers, who are some of the folks that just, without question, are most adversely affected by already ongoing climate change: Stronger floods, rains that are damaging to yields, prolonged droughts. That’s something that everybody is aware of. People that produce our food are at the front lines of feeling the effects of climate change.

So it’s a way to benefit people that are very strongly affected by this. It’s a way to have income for carbon removals going to people that are higher. Some of the most financially insecure people in the world. So I think that’s one of the main benefits to it. But one of the aspects that I’m really excited about for enhanced weathering is that it can and in many cases does improve agricultural yields as well. So it’s something that rather than being a carbon removal solution, being in competition with food, it actually is helping to increase the amount of food we produce per unit area.

Steph
And as the global food supply gets more disrupted by climate change, as the population grows around the world, this can actually increase global food security and most people aren’t chemists or geochemist. Can you talk about the mechanism in which enhanced rock weathering actually increases crop yields?

Noah
The other aspect that I wish everybody knew about enhanced weathering is that soil management in agricultural settings is something that is already an essential part of agriculture. So the process right now is carbon positive. It’s not a process that is geared towards removing carbon, but the basic idea of what enhanced weathering is.

But think about just from a farming point of view. This is soil management. And that’s something that is essential when soil gets too acidic. Plants end up having really poor nutrient uptake. Plants, not surprisingly, have an ideal set of conditions. They would like to grow, and they have an ideal temperature range, ideal moisture range. They also have ideal sets of the chemistry of the soil. So what this is ideally doing is trying to bring the chemistry of the soil into the right conditions, where they maximize the amount of nutrients that that plant is uptaking, that maximizes the amount of yields that you get per per unit area.

If you have highly depleted soils, soils that have been really strongly weathered or are lacking in nutrients, adding the crushed rocks besides just priming, you for nutrients that are added externally are already existing in the soil. Some of the crushed forms of rock will be adding nutrients back to the soil as well. One of the rocks that does that, that we do a lot of research on is basalt, which is actually the most common rock on Earth. And that has micronutrients that are essential for plants like zinc.

Steph
So putting crushed rock on soil improves soil health, improves the nutrition of food, improves crop yields and ideally is helping farmers. When you have technology that’s not quite it’s proven out and it is still being studied. How do you gain farmers trust to start using enhanced rock weathering to improve their crop yields?

Noah
I think a lot of folks have a sense that farmers are are hesitant to change, and that farmers also don’t have, have a good sense of the chemistry of soils. That’s something I always push back very, very strongly on. Most farmers have a better sense of soil chemistry than many of my academic colleagues.

So when you’re talking to a farmer about modifying the pH, which is, you know, the kind of formal definition of the amount of acid in that soil, they know exactly what you’re talking about. They know that if they don’t modulate the amount of acidity in the soils, their yields end up decreasing. And have found that most farmers have a very good sense of that, because their income every single year is dependent on maximizing their yields. Making sure that they’re doing everything they can to produce as much food as possible with as little cost to them as possible.

Steph
And you have direct experience in this. You have a farming background. Can you talk about your own personal journey to to go from where you grew up and how you ended up in working on geochemistry?

Noah
I grew up in the Midwest. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I grew up very closely tied to the agricultural sector, and the sense of wanting to directly tie into to agriculture was something that has always been part of the research that I’ve done, even though a lot of my research as a geochemist has has touched on a wide range of topics.

As a geochemist, you end up being able to tie into a whole bunch of different sectors. So I’ve worked on medical issues, I’ve worked on mining issues, our economic geology have worked on very blue sky questions about how Earth evolved. Going through tenure allowed me to do something that was much more risky than, than the standard path for me, that was focused just on academic publications.

Steph
You have experience in co-founding companies in this space. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Noah
I have cofounded two companies that are actively doing carbon removal and, have have been very successful in, in tying into purchase agreements with, with large corporations. And I think it’s, it’s one thing to produce papers in academia and hope that they are taken up by people and end up to go on to do things. But the goal of a lot of academic research is obviously to have it make a direct impact in the world. And for carbon removal, I think it’s, you know, it’s obvious that it can lead to a better world. So I, I’ve taken the stance that and have been fortunate to have people that could collaborate with this where instead of just producing something in, in the academic literature and hoping that it’s an act has been able to directly work with entrepreneurs, directly work with investors and nonprofits to try to, move technology directly out. People view the academic community and climate change mitigation in different ways. I think, the healthiest way to view that, or the way we’d like to view that, is we view ourselves as partners in doing this. We don’t view ourselves as policing efforts that industry does. We should try to be part of commercialization efforts and make sure that they’re rolling out in a way that is grounded in the best possible science. That’s the easiest way, I think, for us to learn from a lot of the mistakes that plagued the traditional voluntary carbon market, which has been something that has been plagued by controversy, has been something where there have, without question, been been missteps. Not all of those are related to not having a firm understanding of the science, but some of those are.

Steph
And those companies that you’ve started and are out doing carbon dioxide removals, how are they related to these technologies? Are they separate about and enhanced weathering?

Noah
Both companies are doing enhanced weathering. And to to give a shout out to them as the CEOs are both my former students who are amazing. It’s lighthouse carbon and crew carbon. And I also want to say that work very closely with a nonprofit that is also doing carbon tax removal also in the enhanced weathering space called Mati Carbon.

I think one of the things to stress as well is that have taken a little bit of a nontraditional path for, for involvement with companies in this that and was a co-founder of these, these companies, but decided not to retain any equity in the companies or have any financial ties to, to the companies right now. I think there’s obvious reasons of why we want more people that don’t directly stand to make money from aspects of carbon tax removal. I think that has allowed me to advocate more strongly for aspects of carbon removal that I think are advancing the best science behind these practices and, advocating for things that will also just help the rollout be smoother with transparency.

Steph
Because you don’t have financial stakes in companies. Can you help us understand more objectively how different companies are playing in this space? Like what are the each of their differentiation? If a climate investor were to look at these different companies, how would they really understand the differences?

Noah
So there has been a boom in investment from that, which has been great for advancing the field. When I talk to investors about carbon removal companies: Can you can you measure the carbon you claim to be removing is the carbon actually a fundable, fungible commodity. So how companies are doing that. And if that works in their location is the obvious thing. That’s a differentiator.

And then it doesn’t matter if you can measure it, but it’s absurdly expensive. It doesn’t matter as well. So it’s question, is it real? Is it actually economically feasible? How is it going to scale? The one that I stress to folks, as well as I think social acceptance of a carbon tax removal is going to be higher if you’re also helping people, if you have something that does this benefit the community, do the people in your community want you to be there? I think that makes a big difference in companies that are going to end up being stable, are going to be things that are embraced by their communities. Their growers are going to want them to. The folks in the community are going to want them. And that’s something investors often overlook.

Steph
I agree, and you’re talking about a business model where all these companies are being monetized through largely carbon credits and the sale of that. There are large corporations like Microsoft and Shopify and Stripe that have bought these credits, and there’s still a pretty high price. What price would you say the carbon credits are now and what price could they get to through enhanced rock weathering over time?

Noah
A lot of different things are right now largely considered under the same umbrella. So most of the carbon credits that are sold and of the roughly, a couple billion dollar industry around that is for carbon storage through land use management. It’s very hard to think of that as permanent carbon removal, not cutting down a tree as an example. Land use forest management is where the vast majority of activity and carbon marketplaces are today.

Right now, people are paying hundreds of dollars a ton for these durable carbon removal credits and for enhanced weathering. Rightfully so. Most of the large buyers have put tracking the carbon fluxes at a high priority. So one of the reasons these are so expensive right now is because we’re doing a lot of monitoring to understand where this process actually works. What are the exact carbon fluxes in any one setting? The long term goal is to have this to be brought down to around $100 a ton in many areas. That’s a commonly thrown around number. And enhanced weathering is something that in many cases is definitely feasible.

Steph
So let’s talk about measurement then. Making sure that these credits are actually verifiable, durable and permanent. Like you say, could increase the trustworthiness of this new technology. So can you talk about how this is monitored and if there are any gaps in that?

Noah
So all of the credits that are being issued right now are based on empirical measurements in the field scale. And there are lots of ways of doing this. You have to make a geochemical measurement that is tracking how the weathering is occurring. You can track the weathering reaction by looking at the chemistry of soils, you can look at the chemistry of waters that are leaving the field, or you can look at air gas fluxes and look for the actual signal of CO₂ uptake. And all of these approaches have their pros and cons. So it’s when folks think about this and advocate for a particular method, I think it’s important to keep in mind that all of these are expensive and hard.

The amount of carbon that we’re actually removing from enhanced weathering right now is trivial. So the money that we’re spending right now is really about ensuring that we chart the best path forward for when this could actually be at scale. So making sure that we have high confidence is in the actual carbon fluxes is of utmost importance right now.

Steph
So, when the rock eventually flows to rivers and oceans, are you measuring any of that? And how do you actually prove to people that it’s durable and permanent?

Noah
One of the things that we’re really excited about is monitoring at very large scales, monitoring in river networks. And at this stage, one of the things that’s so important about that is making sure that we have baseline measurements, is that ultimately will be the way to have high certainty in these measurements. It’s not impossible to change the chemistry of rivers. It is very possible to to have measurements eventually, if this would be at scale, at even the largest rivers in the in the world. But in terms of certainty from this more broadly, a lot of our understanding of this is from models of how rivers behave and models for how the oceans behave. So river chemistry and the oceans, which you know, have both the dynamics and the biogeochemistry behind those are incredibly complex. Often folks assume that we have no way of possibly being able to track these fluxes.

Steph
And one of the things that’s changing the pH of the ocean and rivers is often fertilizer runoff. Right? And enhanced rock weathering allows us to use less fertilizer is another benefit to farmers. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that works?

Noah
We’re trying to really get crops to utilize nutrients as best as possible. If we do have better perfect acid management in soils, we eventually would be reducing the amount of fertilizer we put down, and on top of thinking about just the acidity that could be moving in rivers, it would be reducing the amount of pollution that’s coming from agricultural fields.

I think anybody that’s been in agricultural regions know that there’s been a massive amount of degradation to freshwater ecosystems, like the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. That’s an area that is commonly referred to as a dead zone that, because of nutrient input, often becomes devoid of oxygen to the point where fish life and many of the complex life form that is no longer possible, and any one year it’s larger than the state of Massachusetts.

Steph
So I’m you know, you’ve talked about what if we were to be able to scale enhanced rock weathering, I’d love to drill down on the barriers to that and potential solutions. What do you see as the biggest barriers to scale right now?

Noah
Making sure that we learn from the initial deployments, making sure that the information from those is available for everybody to to learn from is going to be really important for scaling as a sector is rapidly scaling. There’s going to be some things that are tried that don’t pan out, either from a basic science point of view or from an economic point of view. Learning from all of that is going to be essential to continue to have strong growth, carbon dioxide removal in general, and enhanced weathering falling into that is going to be dependent on funding for this process.

If we aren’t valuing carbon emissions at all, if we’re not tracking the massive amount of damage from climate change every single year economically in terms of human suffering and stress, it’s going to be difficult to have large amounts of money going in to try to to fight climate change. But ultimately, if you imagine scaling to the sort of levels where it could be possible from a geochemical point of view, that’s going to require massive amounts of investment.

Steph
So this massive investment, I want to talk about the private side first. On the private side, you know, you have private companies buying these carbon credits as one form of financing for enhanced rock weathering companies and projects. Where else do you need to see more investment from?

Noah
It’s a relatively small number of large tech companies that are doing the vast majority of permanent carbon removals for the voluntary carbon market. To scale, you need to have investment from other sectors. And there’s been some interest from banking, which is obviously not a traditional tech company in the same sense. And banking is one where you have very high profit relative to emissions. So you would stand out as obvious targets for being able to pay for carbon removal with limited direct negative economic effects or effects on growth.

But where a lot of the emissions aren’t only coming from the tech sector or only the banking sector. A lot of the emissions reductions need to come from the highest emitters, and so far that their investment in durable carbon removal has been incredibly limited. So I think it’s one of the concerns from that if you do the simple math from something that’s a cement company, an aviation company, an oil company, if they think about, paying $100 to offset all of their emissions, that is transformative from their bottom line. And that’s something that is going to be a blocker.

Steph
Yeah. And I’d love to loop back to your challenge about funding and not talking about the public side. It’s impossible to talk about public financing without policy. Most state-level carbon removal incentives don’t include enhanced rock weathering, and it’s not included in various tax credits like 45 cu. So how could we fill the gap on public financing for technologies like enhanced rock weathering? And how could policy be improved to enable that deployment?

Noah
Great question. So 45 CU is is a great place to start in that that is specifically meant for underground carbon injection. And that can either be from the oil and gas industry or it can be from direct air capture injection. I think that same concept has been very popular and is something that, at various times has had bipartisan support. So introduce something that is very similar to to 45 CU is but is encompassing a wider range of technologies. There has been bipartisan support for them. And that obviously is not going to move forward in the current administration. But that basic idea is something that I think building up bipartisan support for that idea is something that I think is at the policy level, is one of the most important things we can do.

And state carbon programs, I think, are really important. We can learn from state-level programs to think about how to implement things in the federal level. So purchasing programs and ways to fund carbon removal in Massachusetts and New York that are advancing are very exciting. And I hope that enhanced weathering can be incorporated into those. And we can learn from that process to think about how this could be implemented at a much larger scale, at a federal scale. The obvious one for thinking about funding agricultural practices is through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is undergoing a dramatic transformation. We give massive amounts of subsidies to to growers. Soil management affects farmers bottom lines. It also controls the amount of pollution that comes from farms, is something that I would love to see as a USDA priority.

One of the transformations of American agriculture is more and more growers are working fields that they don’t own. The amount of farmers that work in fields that are rented is sharply increasing year after year. One of the predictable aspects of agriculture is we have less actual growers in the US, more people work in land that they don’t own. So it’s very few folks that don’t know if they’re going to be work in that same field next year, are going to invest, are going to invest in something that will benefit the next renter. And that’s setting up because this is such an essential aspect of getting yields are setting up really quite a crisis. And that’s I think, where that makes sense for the USDA to acknowledge that in part because of policies they put in place. But soil management is an essential aspect of agriculture. And if you asked growers if they would like to have help most growers in areas that that are affected by acidic pH, if you ask them if they wanted economic help to try to maintain their soil, I think you’d be damn hard pressed to find one that said they didn’t want that.

Steph
And can you talk a little bit more about the drivers that are causing more and more farmers to work on rented land?

Noah
Large portions of farmland are being owned by very wealthy individuals. It’s a very small investment, and those are still being put in agricultural production land, instead of saying in family farms is going to take, you know, is often being purchased by groups of buyers, as investments or just by wealthy landowners investments. And part of the broader structure from this is that if you have $1 million in and basically equipment and debt from that, you just need to be able to work a large number of acres from that.

Farming is becoming more specialized. The number of family farms that are diversified every single year is decreasing. It’s easy to have larger and larger and larger farms if you don’t consider the positive aspects that smaller farms that are more diversified can bring.

Steph
And so part of what is happening is that farmers can’t really think about investing in making the soil health better for four years out, because they don’t know if they’re going to be on that land. And I appreciate you really centering people and communities and the benefits to them as a way to prioritize various climate solutions can enhance rock weathering. Rock be made available to farmers at a cheaper price than the normal lime that they would distribute over their fields to improve crop yields or other kind of substrates.

Noah
Right now, farmers are typically adding a practice that really took off after World War two, as farmers are adding limestone the fields and that process can be either carbon positive or carbon negative, depending on how you do that. If you have optimal application, you can actually make that process carbon negative as well. But the way it’s typically done right now is that it’s carbon positive for an extended period of time at least.

So the way to think about limestone addition is that the carbon impact of that process will depend on the application style. But it’s never going to be able to remove as much carbon as you would have from applying silicate rocks. The basalt, the most common rock on Earth that I mentioned previously. In the best case scenario for limestone, it removes half the amount of carbon in a reaction point of view as silicates would. Instead of having one feedstock that is right, we want to be able to have a framework that ties in how much these things cost, ties into transport costs of what is right for an area.

Steph
Yeah. And the more localized you got, your supply chain, the less carbon emissions you have in the supply chain. Can you talk about how companies get their feedstock right now and what that supply chain looks like.

Noah
A huge proportion of growers in the US will add limestone occasionally. And that’s, you know, that’s part of utilizing this, this agricultural infrastructure, for silicates, you can tie into that same kind of distribution network. But it’s for silicates because it’s at a relatively small scale right now. Mostly what it’s utilizing is ways as we make aggregate for roads. So taking a waste product, working with quarries to tie that into what would already be the existing infrastructure that adds soil amendments in agricultural region.

And right now what we don’t have, which would be essential for removing down costs for all of this, is instead of just utilizing trucking, tying into what are the less carbon intensive transport processes. So rail and barges are the cheapest way to move large amounts of material any significant distance. And that’s something that right now is not a major part of not a major part of adding rocks to farm fields.

Steph
And so using less expensive ways to transport the feedstock is one way to get that price of per ton of carbon down. When we’re talking about getting that price from hundreds of per ton down to 100 per ton, what other solutions could we be employing right now?

Noah
A huge portion of that cost is on the monitoring, making sure that we learn from the monitoring that we’re doing so we can less intensively sample eventually. What we’d ideally be able to transition is from everything being empirically-based to being model-based, with empirical measurements being used to gauge the uncertainty. We really have to be able to learn from these initial deployments in this massive amount of new measurements that we’re making. Part of that learning is making sure that we can calibrate models and can show that models can actually, at the field scale, accurately predict the the processes that we’re doing.

Steph
And when you’re advising companies and that are looking to purchase carbon removal credits, how do you advise them to spend their money?

Noah
Because the amount of carbon removal, again, is at such a small scale, is making sure that we’re learning from these initial purchases. It’s really hard to justify that we can learn from things if we can’t actually get full information about the project.

Steph
And you talked about potential new customer bases like a bank potentially purchasing this. How would you sell that to a bank as beneficial to them?

Noah
Well, I mean at this early stage, I think, it’s and just to be clear, some folks in the banking sector have actually already made investment into enhanced weathering and other forms of carbon removal. There’s not a regulatory framework that’s promoting people to be in the voluntary carbon market. So the obvious benefit from this is either that there will be a perception and a benefit from a branding point of view, or that you’re actually going through the exercise for realizing that damages from climate change are not going away. They’re going to actually get much more extreme.

I find it very hard to imagine a world where we allow people to continue to pollute, which is basically what carbon emissions are, with no repercussions. If you leave a bag of garbage out in the street, even if nobody’s telling you, pick it up today. Surely you can’t think in ten years that you can still have a pile of garbage on your curb. Eventually, somebody needs to pick up that goddamn garbage.

Steph
And going back to the community benefits of enhanced rock weathering. You talked about money flowing from carbon markets to farmers. What other other community benefits should we cover if we haven’t already covered them all?

Noah
There is a tremendous potential to have transformative effects with smallholder farmers. A large portion of the world is directly dependent on food from smallholder farmers. A large portion of households are dependent on smallholder farmers. In many cases, whole countries can have income streams that are around a dollar a day to be able to have them gain a $100 or $200 from carbon purchases is something where the actual impact in their overall income is really transformative for enhanced weathering potentially does is it allows you to have permanent carbon removal while directly benefiting smallholder farmers.

Steph
Is there any equity concern about doing this in areas where there are vulnerable communities? There’s so much distrust in those communities from other energy solutions that have extracted from their communities. So could you speak to that, that perception?

Noah
You could have for profit companies that are not careful. There are certain feedstocks that could have real health concerns. If the goal of this is to help farmers, you have to help smallholder farmers. You have to take that seriously and have that actually be in the forefront. That’s going to mean working with local communities. It’s going to be making sure that you’re not out of step with the local government. It’s going to be making sure that you’re not out of step with other organizations that have a strong track record of advocating for smallholder farmers and that’s something that is going to be hard to do.

Steph
What does that community engagement look like today when companies are going to farming communities and saying, we have this ingenuity, it could increase your crop yield, it will make your soil better. You use less fertilizer. What does that engagement look like?

Noah
The organization that I work with, that is really excited about working with smallholder farmers is Mati carbon. This is working with rice growers in India, and has been very strict about working with folks that are true smallholder farmers who have a couple acres. They’re meeting with every single grower making sure that every single grower has the chance to ask any questions, ensures that they have basically a clear outreach where they can contact the organization at any time.

There’s a huge amount of staffing that goes into working directly with the smallholder farmers. Just because you’re putting in the time, it doesn’t mean that’s going well. But if you don’t put in the time to actually interact with people, there’s no way that’s going to go well. So it’s an obvious first step for this think is is, which again, I think Mati has done a tremendous job of is making sure that you making sure that you are aware of where they’re, where they’re calling from, making sure that you take the time to directly engage with everybody, even if they only own an acre, or even if they’re only working in acre of land.

Steph
And it goes back to what you called for, which is investments in monitoring and tracking on the science side to make sure that we know what the impacts are to people.

So what’s one misconception people have about enhanced rock weathering that you wish they didn’t?

Noah
The most common misconception that I think people have is that enhanced weathering either works or it doesn’t work. And that is a really unproductive way of thinking about this problem.

Enhanced weathering is going to be effective in some areas, and it’s going to, without question, be just a horrible idea in some other areas. Having that perspective - that this is a process that works or doesn’t - also decreases the emphasis we put on needing to optimize this practice and really finding out the areas where this does work well from a scientific point of view. And then again, obviously, where does that overlap with areas where this can be economically feasible? The basic idea of it is very simple. Earth is habitable because of weathering. It would make sense that enhanced weathering would help.

Steph
And make it more habitable for years to come. Thank you so much for spending your time with us and sharing your vast knowledge on this. I know your research spans more than enhanced rock weathering, but you’re a great expert on it, so appreciate your time.

Noah
Thanks again for having me.