By helping farmers measure soil moisture with precision, a simple sensor is reducing waste, improving yields, and making agriculture more sustainable.

RANDFONTEIN, South Africa –

Patricia Seaba faced many challenges when she began farming. But few were as perplexing as the exploding cabbages. One moment, the plants seemed fine, cocooned snugly in their leaves, growing into the swirly purple and white heads that customers in suburban grocery stores couldn’t get enough of. The next, she was sitting in her living room when she heard a pop outside. When she got to the field, the cabbages “were bursting like balloons,” Seaba recalls. 

The problem continued for the rest of the season. Not every cabbage she grew self-detonated, but enough of them did that it eventually stopped surprising her. Sometimes, Seaba says, she would pick a cabbage intact, only to have its rubbery body split apart in her hands. 

Seaba knew that the plants she grew were always communicating with her. As she tended the fields of her 17.5-hectare (43 acre) vegetable farm near Johannesburg, she watched their color, texture, and posture for clues about what they needed. But exploding cabbages were like a foreign film with no subtitles. They must be trying to tell her something. She just had no idea what. 

The answer, when it arrived, was unexpected. And it came from an equally unforeseen source. One day in 2023, a government liaison for farmers visited Seaba. He had a small device in his hand, made up of three wires, each with a small white water-sensing bulb dangling from it. The man explained that this was a Chameleon. It had been developed by an organization called the Virtual Irrigation Academy (VIA) to tell farmers like Seaba how much moisture was in their soil. That, in turn, would help them make better decisions about watering their crops. 

Seaba was skeptical. After all, she could see with her own eyes when the red dirt at her feet was cracked and dry, indicating the roots coiled below the surface needed water. Anyway, she and her partner Rinae Tshikangavhadzi irrigated their fields the same way all their neighbors did—three times a day, every day. Why reinvent the wheel? 

Still, they decided to give the little device a try. And almost immediately, the Chameleon returned a surprising message. “We saw we were giving all the plants too much water,” she recalls. 

This, it turns out, is what the exploding cabbages had been trying to tell her. They were drowning. 

Turning Water Into Food 

VIA’s Founder Richard Stirzaker has been talking to plants most of his life. Long before he was a research scientist with a specialty in irrigation and an obsession with what he calls “turning water into food,” he was a little boy growing vegetables in the sandy soil of his Cape Town backyard. 

When he was in kindergarten, his teacher asked him to bring a seed to school and plant it. “I couldn’t believe that thing made a bean,” he recalls. “I thought, this is magic.” 

Stirzaker never fully recovered from that wonder. Instead, he turned it into a career. When he was a teenager, his family moved to Australia, where he pursued his PhD in soil physics. Then he went to work studying agriculture for the country’s national science organization, CSIRO. 

Over time, he became obsessed with one particular problem: Water. 

Stirzaker often worked with smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. And every one he met grappled with the same quandary: how much water was needed for their plants to grow. 

To be clear, the technology to solve the problem existed. The 5 percenters of global agriculture, large commercial farms, were outfitted with an expensive array of devices to measure the moisture, temperature, and nutrient content of their soil. As a result, they could gauge with precision when to water, and equally crucially, when to stop. 

But more than half the world’s food is grown on farms less than 50 hectares (123 acres) in size. A third is grown on farms smaller than 2 hectares (5 acres). And Stirzaker knew that when it came to gauging water use, smallholder farmers had almost nothing to go on but what they saw with their own eyes. 

And as it turned out, their eyes were deceiving them. 

The conventional wisdom tended to go like this: Irrigate your crops when the soil looks dry. And yes, dry soil sometimes means dry, thirsty plants. But it can also just as easily indicate that the ground is protecting itself, forming that crusty exterior to shield the moisture below from evaporation. 

However, short of digging up their own fields every time they watered them, farmers had no way to see what was happening down in the root zone. And because the dangers of too little water were so clear, they often ended up swinging too far in the other direction. They “killed their plants with kindness,” explains Luan Steyn, VIA’s Research and Development Engineer. Kindness, that is, in the form of too much water. 

Overwatering, it turns out, is all kinds of bad for farms. It flushes nutrients from the soil, which must be replaced—often at great expense—with fertilizer. Plants yield less. And that’s to say nothing of the social implications. Water is a shared resource, and in many parts of the world, farmers compete for their share of communal sources, cutting rifts through communities and families. 

Closing the Knowledge Gap 

For Seaba and Tshikangavhadzi, the exploding cabbages proved only the tip of the iceberg. They irrigated all their crops three times a day, just as they saw the other farmers in the area do. But all that irrigation meant that they had to keep their small pump running day and night to transport water from a nearby dam to the fields. Huge electricity bills chewed away at the farm’s small profits, leaving the couple scrambling to pay their workers. 

Seaba and Tshikangavhadzi had gone into farming with romantic notions of how it might go. Both in their early 30s, they’d grown up in Soweto, a Black township south of Johannesburg that was synonymous with urban grit. “To me, cucumbers came from the grocery store,” Seaba says. 

But Tshikangavhadzi’s family had a background in farming, and in 2014, he, his mother, and Seaba began farming a plot of land leased from the Department of Agriculture. The farm was part of a government effort to redistribute land from white farmers—who, according to experts at Stellenbosch University, still own nearly 80% of the country’s farmable land—to Black ones. 

The leasing program got the family a good deal on the land itself. But there was another chasm they still had to cross to have any chance of keeping up with their white neighbors who had been running commercial farms for generations. That was the gap in knowledge. 

Seaba and Tshikangavhadzi knew they needed to learn everything they could about vegetable farming, as fast as they possibly could, and so they threw themselves into applying for mentorships, grants, and awards. 

But both say one of their most profound learning experiences came from their two engineered water measurement devices, which they received from VIA. 

Those two products are the fruits of Stirzaker’s career-long obsession with the small-farmer water problem. 

His first invention is what he calls a Wetting Front Detector (WFD). The funnel-shaped gadget is inserted into the ground to measure how deep moisture from irrigation and rain goes. For instance, it tells farmers if the water has reached a plant’s roots. The device also takes samples of the soil water that can be tested to measure salt and nitrate levels—key indicators of healthy soil. 

The other device, the aforementioned Chameleon, measures water suction, or how hard it is for the plant roots to extract water from the soil at any given time. Stirzaker says that what sets these two devices apart from other water management tools on the market is their price point (cheap) and how easy they are to use (very). 

The Chameleon, for instance, employs a simple color code to help farmers interpret its data. A reader lights up red if the soil is dry, green if it is moist, and blue if it is wet. 

Of course, Stirzaker is quick to point out, the colors alone don’t determine what a farmer does next. They are just a data point. “This is not a tech fix, it’s a people fix,” Stirzaker says. “People possess so much creativity to solve problems if they just have the right information.” 

The Power of Data 

On a recent morning, in a small room in a low-slung industrial park in Pretoria, a blocky metal machine gobbled plastic pellets. It whirred and beeped, and several seconds later produced a small plastic cylinder destined for the interior of a Chameleon sensor. 

When Stirzaker founded VIA in 2016, he was building nearly all his devices himself in his lab in Australia, then hauled suitcase-loads of them to the African countries where he worked. 

But since then, Stirzaker and his team, led by engineers Luan Steyn and Divan de Vaal, have devoted themselves to figuring out how to make nearly every piece of their technology, from the wiring down to the water sensing tip, locally in Africa. 

The idea, he says, is that the communities using the sensors should “not just be at the end of our value chain, but also at the beginning.” 

Today, nearly every part of the Chameleon—save its microprocessors and a few associated pieces—is made in South Africa, as is the WFD. And VIA recently opened a second production line for Chameleons in Blantyre, Malawi. 

To date, VIA has produced and sold nearly 100,000 WFDs and Chameleons in 20 countries, largely through projects and NGOs, who distribute them to small-scale farmers. But the organization wants to reach more farmers, and faster, and for that, Stirzaker says, they simply need to get bigger. 

That will help them reach even more farmers like Seaba and Tshikangavhadzi. 

Last year, the couple’s farm hit a major milestone. They obtained an inter- national quality and sustainability certification called the Global G.A.P. Among other things, this required that they show auditors how they were responsibly managing the farm’s water use. 

Easy. They just whipped out their Chameleon sensors and the case was closed. When the farm received its certification, they popped a bottle of champagne in celebration. 

Stirzaker’s device had made it easy to quantify the progress they’d made on the farm. But they already knew they were succeeding. 

Learn more about Virtual Irrigation Academy.

Author: Ryan Lenora Brown
Photographer: Lauren Mulligan

An innovative biotech startup is using nature’s own signals to fight crop-killing insects—without toxic chemicals. 

TUCUMÁN, Argentina –

When dozens of desperate farmers and seed and agrochemical vendors flocked to Victoria Coll’s laboratory in Tucumán, Argentina, she knew her research had finally met its moment. 

It was September 2023, and the visitors were on edge about the corn leaf­ hopper—a four­millimeter­long bug already decimating the grain crops nationwide. Traditional insecticides had failed, leaving farmers facing billions in losses. Coll, a botanist with a doctorate in analytical chemistry, was certain the answer lay in cracking the code plants use to communicate with insects: their scent. 

“Smell is a very universal language, except for between us humans,” Coll says. “Ants and bees, for example, communicate mainly through olfactory cues.” 

Ultimately, Coll made the farmers and vendors powerful allies in the fight against the leafhopper when she became one of the four founders of Semion. The company, a biotech start­up launched in 2023, focuses on restoring crops’ ability to defend against pests. 

Their method consists of spraying the plants with substances that boost their natural defenses, activating genes that make them release odors that change insects’ behavior. Those scents both repel plagues and attract parasitoids, other insects that kill the pests and do not harm the plants. Semion is currently working on pests affecting corn and citrus and, in May, they will finish their on­field trials. They plan to scale up their production later this year. 

Coll always wanted to be a biologist. Before beginning with Semion, she spent more than a decade in Tucumán investigating corn and its interaction with the leafhopper. 

The corn leafhopper transmits four pathogens causing the corn stunt disease, which results in visibly shorter plants, leaves with white streaks and red edges, and smaller ears with almost no grains. The leafhopper also lays eggs in the plant’s bud, leaving open stomata that expose it to drying. 

“When the plant is very infected, there can be up to 50 leafhoppers per plant— it has no chance to survive,” explains Coll, who did much of her research in collaboration with the renowned entomologist Eduardo Virla, with whom she shares the laboratory in Tucumán.

Warnings Ignored, a Crisis Takes Root 

At least since 2005, Virla has been warning people in the agricultural community that Argentina could have a major problem with corn leafhoppers, but no one took him seriously. 

“I told them, the way you are handling things, this is going to blow up at any moment,” says Virla. The corn leafhopper can live up to three months in corn ears. Its depopulation occurs naturally when there is no corn growing. But now, he says, Argentine farmers are growing corn almost all year round. “You have two months at the most without corn. In other words, you are benefiting the bug,” he says. 

Moreover, higher temperatures due to global warming and entire years without frost mean the insects can thrive, even beyond the 30° latitude, where the leafhopper is historically associated. Virla calls the phenomenon “tropicalization.” 

Coll did not fare better. When publishing scientific papers or asking for funding for her investigation, she says people in academia and at agricultural supply companies usually brushed her off, telling her that she should change her object of study as the insect “was not a problem.” 

“No one [but us] was studying the odor produced by the corn plant as it was attacked by the leafhopper,” says Coll. Through a gas chromatographer, she outlined the “volatilome” of multiple corn types—that is, the “aura” of volatile compounds that originate from it, or its odor profile, so to speak. That way, they could learn which of its components attracted the leafhopper, which repelled it, and which attracted the leafhopper’s parasitoid—a wasp that lays its eggs inside the planthoppers’ eggs, interrupting their hatching process. It is called Anagrus virlai, named after Virla himself when its biology was first described in 2018. 

The research Coll and Virla were undertaking would later be instrumental in developing Semion, but at the time, their work fell on deaf ears. 

Lessons From a Citrus Tree 

Unable to move forward with the leafhopper project, Coll moved to Fort Pierce, Florida in 2022 with a Fulbright Fellowship to apply her research to another kind of pest. She had contacted a researcher in the Agricultural Research Service who was also working with hormones and odors to fight a plague: the citrus greening disease, also known as HLB, which can shorten the lifespan of citrus trees from 40 years to 5–7. The disease, caused by bacteria, is transmitted by an insect called psyllid and has no known cure. It is the most serious problem in the Florida citrus industry, reaching more than 90 percent of the crops. 

Working with Alejandro Forlin, an Argentine agricultural engineer, Coll tested her hypothesis in the laboratory and later in Fort Pierce’s Botanical Garden. The psyllid is highly responsive to a specific volatile compound emitted by HLB­infected plants, so the scientists blocked its biosynthesis in citrus trees and stimulated it in “trap crop plants,” which they transported in Forlin’s car. 

“Beautiful aroma—it was in my car for a week,” Forlin wryly recalls. 

The plan worked even better than everyone hoped—after 10 months, the treated plants were 100 percent free of HLB disease, while non­treated ones were 66 percent infected. 

Back in Argentina, Virla and Coll’s warnings were finally coming true. According to the Rosario Stock Exchange, between 2023 and 2024, 12 million hectares of corn were lost to the leafhopper—18 percent of the country’s total crop in 2023­2024, a loss close to $2 billion. 

International news agency Reuters reported on the matter. “Many are going to reduce their hectares of corn to zero,” Aníbal Cordoba, a farmer in northern Chaco province, told them in May 2024. “You normally find leafhoppers in the bud of the plants if you look. But this year you go to the field, and you find clouds of leafhoppers. It’s just crazy.” 

Return to Argentina 

Coll returned to Tucumán with new determination in 2023 and started trials with compounds that trigger the release of odors that repel the corn leafhopper. In August, Gridx Exponential, the most important biotech startup accelerator in Latin America, contacted Coll for the fourth year in a row. They wanted to turn her investigation into a business—in previous years, she had rejected them because she did not feel ready. This time, she accepted. 

Through GridX Exponential, Coll met Emilio Molina, an Ecuadorian who for years had been trying to start a plague control company. “I am a third-generation farmer,” says Molina. “My father is a small banana producer and since I was a little boy I saw a very strong correlation: The more agricultural supplies my father applied to his field, the more money he lost,” he says. A clear cycle repeated itself, he says. New agrochemicals were launched, pests became resistant to them, and then they became obsolete. 

In August 2023, Molina, Forlin, Coll, and an entomologist named Jorge Hill founded Semion. The name means “message” in Greek, referring to the messages transmitted through smell. Virla, the entomologist who first discovered the leafhopper’s parasitoid, works as an advisor to the startup. Today, 14 people are working on the project. 

With financing from Gridx Exponential, they started trials in laboratories and fields throughout Argentina and Paraguay. Forlin drives through the country contacting farmers, who he says are generally eager to participate in the research. Having real farmers testing the compounds in the field is important, Forlin says, because there are things that one cannot prepare for in laboratory conditions—rain, wind, storms, other plagues, and the soil. “The soil is alive and it breathes,” he adds.

In its first year of operation, Semion developed Belion, a compound sprayed directly on the plant that triggers the release of odors repelling the leafhopper and attracting the parasitoids. It also increases the plant’s resilience against insect attacks and disease by enhancing physiological traits like nutrient conductivity, photosynthetic capacity, root mass development, and water use efficiency. 

“Domesticated crops lost some defense mechanisms; others are dormant,” says Molina. “We develop products based on natural compounds to activate them when the plant is under stress or attack, so that it expresses genes that were not expressing themselves.” 

In a corn trial at the agronomy school, the scientists found that “plants with chemical controls had a much larger presence of pests and grew less,” says Semion co­founder and entomologist Jorge Hill. He adds that those treated with Semion’s products had fewer pests, “higher photosynthesis values, and in the end, they ended up producing more.” 

The reason, Coll explains, is the same as why the 2024 corn crop fared so terribly. “Since there were so many leafhoppers, farmers, in their desperation, applied insecticide up to 12 times. And, by doing that, they killed the plague’s natural controller—they killed the parasitoid, and the leafhopper was not even tickled.” 

Semion compounds are also less toxic than agrochemicals, benefiting farmers and consumers, as well as the local environment. 

“The solution [companies are proposing] is more insecticide,” Coll says, adding that Semion is proposing a change of paradigm. They plan to partner with an agrochemical company by November to scale up the production and sell their compounds as a bio­stimulant. 

Apart from all the trials in the countryside and laboratories, Coll has put her research to the test in her house garden. “When I had leafhoppers in my grass, I released parasitoids. It is a biological control that does not deregulate the ecosystem, which has a way of self-regulating,” she says. 

“I don’t kill one single spider.” 

Learn more about Semion.

Author: Facundo Iglesia
Photographer: Anita Pouchard Serra

A pilot project explores the challenges of sustainable dining in China.

SHENZHEN, China –

Chen Qiyong spends his workdays sorting out food waste left behind from lavish banquets. In the gleaming kitchen where he works, countless plates piled with uneaten food stream in under the stark white lights. 

“Only we old folks are willing to do this kind of dirty job. Younger people wouldn’t want to,” says Chen, a 50-something cleaner at the Chinese restaurant in Shenzhen’s YM Gold Olives Harmony International Hotel. Nearby, another colleague chimes in while tugging on a pair of gloves. “They wear out too fast— we buy 25 pairs at a time, just in case,” she adds. 

Food waste accounts for nearly half of the total municipal solid waste in the Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen. Much of the fast-growing city’s food waste comes from its catering industry, where it ends up in the hands of workers like Chen. 

Meanwhile, incineration and landfilling remain the dominant waste treatment methods in Chinese cities, both among the highest-emitting options. China’s food system is a major source of the country’s emissions, producing roughly 1.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent—around the same as the total annual emissions of Russia, the world’s fourth largest polluter. High levels of food waste are among the main factors behind these rising food emissions. 

While figures vary depending on methodologies, a 2019 Nature study found a staggering 349 million tons of food—27% of the country’s total production—went uneaten in China each year. Urban restaurants alone wasted at least 34 million tons, enough food to feed up to 49 million people, according to a 2020 government survey. 

“At least one-third of food produced globally is wasted, representing a massive loss of natural resource like water, energy, and land,” says Yvonne Wang, a Program Manager in the Beijing office of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). “If we take action to stop the waste, the impact could be huge.” Tackling food waste is also crucial for China to achieve its climate goals. The country pledged to begin reducing carbon emissions by 2030 and attain carbon neutrality by 2060. 

Recognizing this urgency, the Shenzhen One Planet Foundation (OPF) launched Pride on Our Plates in September 2020 together with WWF Beijing, Rare Europe, and Rare China Center for Behavior. The project helps small and medium-sized restaurants implement waste-reduction strategies though a practical framework and staff training, beginning with pilot projects in six cities across China, including Shenzhen and Beijing. 

In its four-and-a-half years of existence, the project has helped 50 restaurants across China reduce their food waste, including 10 medium-sized hotels with in-house restaurants in Shenzhen. Moreover, Pride on Our Plates has helped to push forward progressive policy changes at the national level, contributing to the formulation of an industry standard that was later endorsed by the central government, Wang says. The food waste reduction implementation guide, which the team developed with the state-affiliated China Hospitality Association (CHA) in Beijing, served as a key reference in a late-2024 national action plan for regional governments and businesses. This broader official plan encourages its adoption to reduce food waste across China’s food systems. 

These achievements, however, obscure the significant hurdles the project faced in its early stages. Wang recalled the pilot project’s rocky start. Amid the sporadic harsh lockdowns in China during the COVID-19 pandemic, recruiting restaurants proved far more difficult than anticipated. Progress toward the team’s initial goal of enlisting 100 restaurants was slowed by the pandemic’s impact on the local catering industry. Restaurant owners, struggling to stay afloat, were hesitant to take on additional commitments. To encourage them to participate, the team partnered with local industry associations, offering media exposure opportunities. Still, it took the team more than a year to finish the recruitment amid other preparation work. 

The team also conducted a baseline survey on food loss and waste in the sector before launching training workshops. With the pandemic limiting in-person sessions, most early training took place online. It was a time of uncertainty, with participants coming and going, Wang recalled. “We train staff on waste sorting, weighing, and key procedures,” she says. “Once they leave, we have to start all over again.” 

Three restaurants they partnered with in the southern tropical city of Sanya even went bankrupt midway through the project. “It really showed us just how tough this industry can be,” she says. 

A Long Battle Against Wasted Food 

Chinese authorities have long sought to reduce food waste, viewing it as a threat to food security in the populous country. But its growing middle class and traditional hospitality practices that encourage over-ordering complicate these efforts. To address the food waste issue, China even passed an “Anti- Food Waste Law” in 2021, which included provisions mandating governments at all levels to monitor and evaluate sources of food waste and allowing restaurants to take practical measures, like charging customers a disposal fee for unfinished food. 

In recent years, public debates about food waste on the national stage have intensified, driven in part by years of advocacy work from organizations like OPF and WWF, which actively engages with state media, including the government-owned China Central Television, and online influencers. This increased awareness coincides with economic pressures on the restaurant industry, prompting many businesses to recognize the cost-saving benefits of reducing food waste. 

However, in 2020, there was still a “gap” in initiatives supporting small and medium-sized business in their food waste reduction efforts, despite their significant role in the catering industry and food chain. According to Yu Xin, program director at WWF China and lead on the project, this gap was the primary reason behind the creation of Pride on Our Plates. 

The G Shenzhen, A Tribute Portfolio Hotel, which opened in 2021 as a Marriott property and operates three in-house restaurants, has benefited from the food waste reduction initiative, according to general manager and project participant Jin Haiwei. The initiative, he adds, has also helped the hotel manage operational costs by identifying key areas for improvement across procurement, quality control, stocking, food preparation, and the ordering process. 

Food scraps, a major source of waste in the past, are now being put to good use at The G Shenzhen Hotel, according to Jin. Previously, these unused portions were discarded in the pursuit of perfect-looking dishes. Now, they’re either reused to feed hotel staff or transformed into creative new dishes, such as cold dishes made with radish peels, celery leaves, or corn silk. 

Given that food catering represents half of the hotel’s revenue, such efforts are essential. “It’s not that we ignored food loss management before,” he says, “but our past efforts were fragmented, not comprehensive.” 

To help restaurants track food waste, the project team developed a WeChat mini-program for daily data entry and automatic analysis of waste reduction. Initially, it lacked a way to input the number of customers, leading to discrepancies. 

“Our food waste fluctuates significantly with the seasons,” explains Fenny Luo, Food Safety Manager at The G Shenzhen Hotel. During periods dominated by buffets and Western-style dishes, the hotel’s restaurants generate up to 400 kilograms of waste daily. However, this figure can soar to 1,750 kilograms— equivalent to five full barrels—during peak season for Chinese banquets. Based on feedback from Luo and others, the project team updated the program, allowing for more accurate tracking of waste. 

By the end of the one-year pilot in late 2024, all participating restaurants had met their baseline goal, reducing food waste by at least 10 percent compared to the previous year. However, banquet seasons have proven to be an enduring challenge. 

These feasts, typically featuring a full table of grand and elaborate Chinese dishes to symbolize hospitality and prestige, often lead to significantly more food waste than the more measured French or Japanese dishes. According to Luo, the hotel managed to halve their food waste between April and August last year but quickly lost those gains when the banquet season arrived. “Controlling the number after September was just too difficult,” Luo says. 

Balancing food waste management and hospitality is a delicate act, says Chen Zhikun, Food and Beverage Manager at Harmony International Hotel: “We certainly don’t want guests to feel unwelcome or that the food is insufficient.” Once, he adds, the in-house restaurant tried to adjust the amount of set dishes to reduce leftovers, only to receive immediate complaints from customers. Similar things happened at The G Shenzhen Hotel. 

Aware of these challenges, the project team views the pilot as just the beginning. They now plan to develop more detailed guidelines to address banquet seasons while continuing to promote responsible food consumption. They are also hoping to calculate the carbon reduction benefits and cost savings from this project. 

What the project has delivered for participating businesses may soon be put to the test, as Shenzhen plans to pilot stricter emissions standards for its hotels. Managers like Jin believe the project experience has come at the right time, helping them to prepare for the test and “get up to speed on reducing carbon emissions.” 

Project Leader Yu Xin says that the experience has also been personally fulfilling. “We are quite proud of what we have achieved,” she says. “You get to see that change is possible. 

Learn more about Pride on our Plates.

Author: Yuan Ye
Photographer: Xioa Nan

A small reactor in Uppsala may hold the key to cutting the fertilizer industry’s massive carbon footprint—by replicating nature’s own nitrogen fixation process.

UPPSALA, Sweden –

On a January morning in the Swedish university town of Uppsala, a group of scientists gathered in a laboratory within a modest cluster of buildings known as the Green Innovation Park and activated a small electromagnetic reactor. They watched through a window as the reactor, enclosed in a hermetically sealed room, began to heat up, cycling plasma and gases through an intricate system of tubes and machinery that has the potential to reshape the future of agriculture. 

“See where the tubes are coming out like a flower around the reactor? It’s extremely intense inside,” said Gustaf Forsberg, the Swedish physicist-turned- startup-founder who dreamed up the core technology behind the reactor. “The temperature in the plasma, we cannot measure it, but we know it goes above 3000 degrees. Look, there is a little fluorescence coming out on the lower left house.” 

“If we hadn’t just changed the adaptor, you’d see florescence coming from the tubes,” said Sankha Nanayakkara, a young scientist who became obsessed with electromagnetics as a child when his father’s ice cream shop in Sri Lanka kept being struck by lightning. Nanayakkara is part of the 20-person team behind NitroCapt, the company Forsberg founded in the belief that it could represent a watershed moment for the global food system. 

The process inside the reactor room is producing nitrate, a key component in fertilizer. This technology, which uses plasma to break apart nitrogen molecules, mimicking the way lightning naturally fixes nitrogen in the atmosphere, has the potential to revolutionize the fertilizer industry, which is currently responsible for around 2.7 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. 

“That’s the same range as the entire aviation industry,” says Forsberg. “Most people are aware of the impact of aviation, and not so many are aware of this.” It’s a staggering statistic. The very thing that feeds the world, that props up agriculture from Kansas to Kenya, does as much damage to our planet as all the planes in the sky. For decades, this has been the price of abundance. Nitrogen fertilizers have helped sustain billions, yet their production depends on fossil fuels, belching out carbon at an astronomical scale. But what if that price didn’t have to be paid? 

That’s the proposition behind NitroCapt, which aims to disrupt one of agriculture’s biggest carbon culprits. Its proprietary technology uses only oxygen, water, and renewable energy to fix nitrogen directly from the air, eliminating the need for hydrogen, a costly and energy-intensive component in traditional fertilizer production. This breakthrough makes the process far more sustainable than both conventional ammonia-based fertilizers and emerging green hydrogen alternatives. If the technology can scale, it could not only slash emissions but also change the balance of global food security. 

“There are grey alternatives with a decent price, and there are green alternatives that are still quite far from cost-efficient,” says Forsberg. NitroCapt, he explains, is “the only alternative which is both green and exceptionally cost efficient.” 

Forsberg, a charismatic, slightly eccentric figure, isn’t your typical startup founder. He grew up on a farm in Sweden, still cultivates grains on his family’s century-old farmstead, and speaks about electromagnetics with a childlike enthusiasm. Before starting NitroCapt in 2016, he was one of the key people behind ThermoSeed, which pioneered a chemical-free alternative for seed disinfection, reducing the industry’s reliance on pesticides. 

Forsberg came up with the idea that led to NitroCapt while contemplating an entirely different topic: a process used by the combustion industry to combat acid rain, which involves removing nitrogen from the atmosphere. 

“As an agronomist and a farmer, I felt that that’s a big waste of nitrogen,” he says. 

Forsberg brought the idea to his former colleague, Peter Baeling, who offered indispensable advice, leading to the incorporation of electrically generated plasma. Through a series of investigations, the two ended up with the process behind NitroCapt’s core technology. They went on to become co-founders of the company. 

NitroCapt’s pilot reactor has been running in their Uppsala lab since early 2024, and space is already set aside for their first commercial-scale reactor. Here, the team has been refining their process, ensuring their system is not just functional but modular and scalable. And while the technology is still at a pilot scale, interest is growing. The company has already secured 9 letters of intent for 33 full-scale production units, representing a future commercial value of more than €1 billion—a sign that the industry is paying attention.

A Cleaner Alternative to Conventional Fertilizer 

Despite its outsized contribution to the warming of our planet, the fertilizer industry flies under the radar. “Even as a farmer, one doesn’t think much about where nitrogen fertilizers come from and how they affect the environment,” says Henrik Lillje, a Swedish farmer and crop consultant. “But you scratch the surface, and you see that they are causing a huge amount of emissions.”

The problem lies in how nitrogen fertilizer is made. Since the early 20th century, the Haber-Bosch process has been the foundation of industrial agriculture, pulling nitrogen from the air and turning it into ammonia using massive amounts of natural gas. The result is a product that brings necessary plant nutrients into fields, lending them high productivity but at the price of a massive carbon footprint. 

And yet, the world has grown to depend on it. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers led to enormous yield increases during the Green Revolution and are a key component of modern conventional farming systems. Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, global food production would plummet by close to 50 percent if no alternatives were used, meaning we could only feed a fraction of the planet’s current population. The industry itself is massive—with an annual sales value of more than $80 billion—and deeply entrenched in geopolitics. 

The geopolitical nature of the industry came to the fore in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when fertilizer prices skyrocketed, exposing just how fragile the global supply chain is. 

“There’s an urgent need in developing countries for domestic production of fertilizer,” said Kristina Mastroianni, a consultant who has worked for on large-scale agricultural development aid projects and sees enormous potential in NitroCapt’s model. “The opportunity I see here with their modular system is that they can be placed anywhere,” she says. “You can have smaller entities that supply the region to avoid supply chain issues.” 

For smallholder farmers in developing nations, access to fertilizer is precarious and unaffordable. Recent supply chain issues, Mastroianni explains, “have had great impact everywhere, but a much higher impact on the poor farmers in these countries. They don’t have access at all to something that is life or death.” 

By decentralizing production and cutting reliance on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, NitroCapt’s model could provide a way for countries to secure domestic production, insulating them from market volatility. With 80 percent of nitrogen fertilizer currently produced in a handful of politically fraught regions, the ability to produce fertilizer locally would be a game-changer. 

Henrik Lillje, the Swedish farmer, is skeptical but hopeful. “It’s a beautiful product… It’s almost too good to be true,” he says. “If they can make it economically competitive, I would say it should sweep the market.” 

Can Green Fertilizer be Competitive in the Market? 

That’s the key question: Can they make it competitive? Right now, green fertilizers are more expensive to produce than traditional ones, largely because of the high cost of green hydrogen, the usual alternative to fossil fuel-based ammonia production. NitroCapt’s method, however, bypasses hydrogen entirely by converting oxygen and nitrogen from the air into nitrate through a plasma-chemical process. The hope is that once the company reaches industrial scale, its costs will drop below traditional methods. 

Forsberg explains that NitroCapt’s roadmap focuses first on scaling the technology from small to large-scale production, a step that will already make them competitive in markets like Europe. Over the next few years, NitroCapt plans to increase energy efficiency further by integrating advanced heat recovery technologies. 

He sees an even greater shift ahead. “When we go to these levels, there will not be any reason anymore to produce fertilizer with any other technology,” says Forsberg. “This is basically zero-emission from the nitrogen fixation process,” he says. “And in addition, we are making the best fertilizer for agriculture, because ammonia-based fertilizers acidify the soils, whereas the pure nitrate- based fertilizers slightly increase the pH of the soil. They are actually increasing, successively, the fertility of the soil.” 

In an era where sustainability is the watchword, NitroCapt represents a huge opportunity. The European Union has introduced policies like Red III, which mandates that 42 percent of fertilizers in Europe be green by 2027. But skepticism runs high. “No one believes this will be possible,” says Björn Lindh, NitroCapt’s strategy director. “They put their heads in the sand.” 

Forsberg is well aware of the skepticism. The fertilizer industry is dominated by giants who have been operating the same way for a century, and they aren’t eager to upend their model. “There are hundreds of announcements about green fertilizer plants,” says Lindh. “But to my knowledge, no one has gotten funding.” 

Why? Because they aren’t yet able to be competitive in the market. Even with looming regulations and carbon taxes, many producers are making the calculation that it’s cheaper to take the fines than to invest in a technology that will significantly increase production cost. 

An Unstoppable Innovation 

But Forsberg and his team believe they have something that changes the equation. Their reactors are already operational, producing nitrogen fertilizer with a radically lower environmental impact. With a first commercial unit on the horizon and interest from major agricultural players like VIVESCIA, a French cooperative that supports 9,000 farmers and oversees 750,000 hectares of farmland, NitroCapt’s moment may be coming faster than even Forsberg anticipated. 

Forsberg knows the road ahead is steep, but he believes the momentum for green innovations like NitroCapt is unstoppable. 

“The sustainable technologies will become more competitive. It will go the right way. The question is just how many bumps we shall jump over,” says Forsberg. “Ultimately, I’m optimistic.” 

Learn more about NitroCapt.

Author: Charly Wilder
Photographer: Emily Wilson

The regenerative agriculture project Astungkara Way is proving that sustainability and food security can go hand in hand.

BALI, Indonesia –

For decades, conventional wisdom has held that organic farming cannot produce enough food to sustain the world’s growing population. Perhaps nowhere has this belief been more deeply entrenched than in South Asia, where high-profile failures—like Sri Lanka’s disastrous 2021 ban on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides—reinforce the fear that sustainability comes at the cost of food security. 

Yet, what if there were a way to grow food sustainably without sacrificing yields? In Bali, Astungkara Way, a regenerative agriculture initiative, is taking on that challenge by rethinking how rice—the lifeblood of half the world’s population—is grown. 

Founded with the goal of integrating traditional Balinese farming wisdom with modern agroecological practices, Astungkara Way works to promote food security, restore degraded farmland, and foster a deeper connection between farmers and the land. Their programs include farmer training, youth engagement, and community-supported agriculture initiatives. But their early attempts to introduce organic cultivation techniques—using compost and reducing water use—were unsuccessful. 

“We had not great results,” acknowledges Tanguy Yu, Chief Operating Officer of Astungkara Way. Yields fell even as farmers faced extra work weeding and disseminating compost by hand. 

A Symbiotic Farming System 

Now, however, they believe they might have discovered a system that squares the circle: environmentally friendly farming which offers yields comparable to conventional modern methods. “Just not using chemicals doesn’t work,” says Yu. “The alternative is agroecology.” This alternative takes the form of a relatively new style of farming called Complex Rice Systems (CRS), which Astungkara Way started trialing in February 2023. Instead of relying on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the system integrates natural, symbiotic techniques to maintain soil fertility and pest control. 

According to the CRS methodology, rice is not cultivated in isolation but as part of a diverse, interdependent ecosystem. Azolla, also known as mosquito ferns, are grown floating on the surface of the paddy, covering the water with a jade-green canopy and fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere so that it acts a natural fertilizer for the plants. Border plants run along the edge of the fields, attracting beneficial insects like wasps that prey on pests threatening rice plants. Each plant contributes something more, too. Tall yellow-flowering Sunn Hemp can be ploughed into the paddy as natural fertilizer. Purple rose balsam can be sold at market for use in temple offerings. And ripening rows of tomatoes and chilis provide further food and market goods for the farmer. 

Animals also play a crucial role. Fish swim in flooded paddy fields, and flocks of ducks live in the paddies, eating weeds and pests while fertilizing the soil with their manure. The fish meat and duck eggs also supplement farmers’ diets and incomes. 

Yu is a passionate evangelist of CRS. At the start of 2024, 17 farmers worked with Astungkara Way. That number has already grown to 170. Still, he admits he has his work cut out to reach his target of 15,000 farmers by 2030—10% of all Bali’s rice farmers. He hopes part of the solution will come from making the model “open source” for others to copy, an idea rooted in his background as a software startup founder. 

If Yu is the evangelist, Dr Uma Khumairoh is the brain behind CRS. A researcher at Indonesia’s University of Brawijaya, she spent years trialing the system at farms in East Java. Her Ph.D. thesis compared rice yields across different methods: conventional fertilizers and pesticides, organic techniques, and the new CRS that integrates azolla, ducks, and other symbiotic elements. 

Her research revealed a striking finding: CRS paddies yielded slightly more than conventionally farmed fields in good weather. In bad weather, the effect was even more pronounced, with CRS yields proving much more reliable than those of conventional farming. In an era of accelerating climate change, such reliability could be a game changer. 

Khumairoh’s research showed that the system works well for farmers too. While the initial transition to CRS involves extra costs and labor, these challenges diminish over time. Farmers spend more time spreading compost but significantly less time weeding, thanks to the ducks. Ultimately, they earn more by selling additional products like eggs and vegetables alongside the plentiful rice crop. 

Scaling up a Sustainable Future 

Astungkara Way is now working to implement CRS on a larger scale while collecting data to further refine the system. Leading these efforts is Shinta Palupi, a former student of Dr. Khumairoh. Sitting on straw mats with her laptop balanced on a stool, she enthusiastically displays reams of figures. “We are collecting lots of data,” she declares. 

So far, the results are promising. The average CRS yield stands at 56 kg per 100 m2 compared to 54 kg per 100 m2 under conventional farming (the small area sizes reflect the tiny plots often farmed by Balinese farmers). But the real financial impact comes from the 36% reduction in input costs, as pesticide and artificial fertilizer expenses drop to near zero. 

Still, challenges remain. Not all farmers have fully adopted the system. Ducks, which are either purchased or rented, are a key part of the system but tricky to incorporate. Farmers long focused on agriculture now must learn to care for livestock. One involved with Astungkara recounted his surprise when the farmer from whom he hoped to rent ducks informed him the weather was too wet—posing a risk to the ducks’ health. 

In parallel, Astungkara Way has begun collecting data on farms still using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Experimenting with different strains of rice and planting patterns is another focus.

Beyond data, a major challenge is convincing older farmers to try a new approach. “They think, ‘If I stop using chemicals I’ll have lower yields,’” says Yu. “And that’s the reason why most farmers don’t make the shift.” 

To address this, Astungkara Way combines hard data with hands-on training. On a humid Tuesday afternoon, four farmers in their fifties and sixties gather in a shaded area in the fields with Gusti Sanjaya, an employee of Astungkara Way. Laminated handouts illustrate yield comparisons across different CRS cycles, rice strains, and planting patterns.

“The real profit [to CRS] is my health,” says one of the farmers, I Ketut Martiyasa. After one harvest with crs, he found the yields a bit lower but touts other benefits. He had found himself frequently growing dizzy after spraying chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

A Generational Predicament 

Overall, the farmers’ experiences have been positive. Wayan Mandiarta, 56, had tried organic farming but experienced lower yields. With CRS, he happily declares that his most recent harvest was about 68 kg per 100 m2—on par with conventional farming but without the cost of purchasing chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the price of which has risen sharply in recent years. 

Ni Made Adnyani, 60, sees wider benefits too. Soil quality has degraded over the years, she says, largely because of the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Despite the extra labor, she plans to stick with CRS. 

Astungkara Way is working hard to support farmers through this transition. Tuesday’s lesson isn’t about evangelizing CRS but teaching practical skills, such as producing biopesticides from papaya leaves, garlic, and galangal. For now, the organization pays farmers slightly above market price for their crop to de- risk the transition. 

But long-term success hinges on making CRS economically viable without external support. One way to ensure this is engaging younger generations in sustainable farming. 

“To put the weight of the transition on old farmers’ shoulders—it’s heart­ breaking,” says Tim Fijal, CEO and Founder of Astungkara Way. “So what’s more and more part of our mindset is how can our model also entail mass engagement of young people.”

The organization is exploring land-leasing projects to attract young farmers and offering training courses on sustainable agriculture. Near Astungkara Way’s headquarters, several young Balinese chop rice husks for duck feed. “Many of my friends want to work in hotels; I prefer working in nature,” says Yulia Dewi, 24. 

Still, the road ahead is difficult. Later that day, as the biopesticide lesson continues, an elderly farmer pulls up on a bike, a plastic tub strapped to his back, a spray nozzle in hand. Stepping onto his field, he begins to douse it with pesticide—his only protection, a hand covering his mouth. 

The transition won’t happen overnight. But at Astungkara Way, they are betting that, with data, persistence, and new ideas, a different kind of farming future is possible. 

Learn more about Astungkara Way.

Author: Joseph Rachman
Photographer: Muhammad Fadli

A once-dismissed discovery in Yellowstone’s geothermal soils is now helping farmers worldwide fight drought, boost yields, and reduce dependence on chemical fertilizers.

SEATTLE, U.S.A. –

Russell “Rusty” Rodriguez didn’t expect to find a key to climate resilience in the superheated soils of Yellowstone National Park. But in 1999, while studying how plants survive in extreme conditions, he and his colleagues Regina Redman and Joan Henson stumbled upon something that could transform global agriculture. They thought their discovery would be celebrated. Instead, they were met with resistance from many scientists.

At the time, Rodriguez was part of the faculty at University of California, Riverside, focusing his research on plant pathology—studying fungal pathogens and what differentiates them from beneficial fungi. He was curious to find out how plants adapted to climate stressors, particularly heat and drought.

Drought pressure causes stunted growth in plants, as well as loss in crop yield and reduced seed germination. Drought has become the biggest concern in terms of food security, putting millions of people at risk of hunger. One quarter of the world’s crops are grown in areas where water supplies are highly stressed and unreliable. Rice, wheat, and corn, which provide more than half the world’s food calories, are particularly vulnerable. Maize crop yields have been projected to decline by 24% by 2030, thanks to climate change impacts.

Since the 1960s, there has been an enormous effort worldwide to generate drought-resilient crops, says Rodriguez, from trying to breed drought-adapted plants with crop plants, to genetic engineering. “And that has been largely unsuccessful,” he adds. “There are no commercially available heat- or drought- tolerant crops—anywhere.”

The approach, Rodriguez says, was a bit naive. “They were focused on the plant being in control of its own destiny.”

It has been common knowledge for a long time that plants are colonized with microbes—just like us. Mycorrhizal fungi are the most well-known; they form a symbiotic relationship with the plant’s roots and grow into the soil, transferring nutrients and water to the plants.

But not all plant-supporting fungi live in the soil. Some, called endophytes, reside entirely within the plant, weaving themselves between its cells. Unlike their more famous counterparts—mycorrhizal fungi, which extend root net- works—endophytes work from the inside out, influencing how plants respond to their environment.

“We knew that plants can adapt to stressors,” Rodriguez explains. “There are desert plants, cold plants, there are all sorts of stress-tolerant plants. So my colleagues and I decided to start asking questions about how plants adapt.”

Very few scientists, says Rodriguez, have asked this question of whether plants are in charge of their own destinies. “Being a microbiologist, I’m more biased on that front, and we’d already learned so much about how microbes can influence plants, so we went out and started looking at whether microbes influenced how plants adapt to stressors.”

Back in the late 1990s, Rodriguez and his colleagues went out to Yellowstone National Park, where in geothermal areas there are places where plants thrive despite the soil being very hot, sometimes reaching up to 65.5°C (150°F). “We started asking questions about how they survive.”

Eventually, by running field tests for more than a year, the scientists found that the plants were colonized by endophytes—and it was these endophytes, living inside the plants, that were the reason why these plants could survive under such intense conditions. The moment of discovery is seared in Rodriguez’s mind. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “We were like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, let’s check the maps and make sure we’re seeing this right.’”

They were seeing it right. “Turns out that these fungi were responsible for the plants ’ ability to tolerate the higher temperatures,” says Rodriguez. We realised that this could be an answer for mitigating the impacts of climate change. These fungi have a profound impact on plants.”

From Scientific Skepticism to Agricultural Breakthrough

The scientists published their discovery in 2002. But the paper was not well received. “At the time I thought, ‘oh, you make a great discovery and people will embrace it’,” Rodriguez remembers. “But we got a lot of heat from the scientific community. I was yelled at in meetings. Our discovery did not fit into the paradigm of ecology and plant biology, and after that we had difficulties getting grants and getting our papers published.”

For the next decade, Rodriguez and his team conducted intensive lab research to support their discovery, including growing the plants in hot conditions without the endophytes (they died). “But when we put the plants back together with the endophytes, they could survive these 150F temperatures again,” Rodriguez says. “The symbiosis between the plant and the endophytes was clearly responsible for their heat tolerance.”

Through experimenting with different plants from different stressful environments, such as salinity and cold, Rodriguez and his colleagues found that the plants needed the specific fungus that was indigenous to the soil the plants came from to survive. In fact, it’s a virus in the fungus that enables heat tolerance—it’s a three-way symbiosis.

Years of academic scepticism pushed Rodriguez in a new direction. If he couldn’t convince the scientific establishment, he’d take his research directly to the field. In 2012, he launched Symbiogenics, a nonprofit focused on applying his findings to real-world agricultural challenges. Around the same time, his wife, geneticist Regina Redman, was developing a startup, Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies (AST), to create climate-resilient plant treatments that harnessed beneficial fungi. Their work aligned perfectly—so they joined forces.

Eventually, AST landed enough funding to bring on staff and focus on developing a product, opening a laboratory in Seattle, Washington. They began field trials on land across the globe ranging from small plots to 100 acres, and have performed more than 1,000 trials since 2012. Crops were sprayed with a liquid form of the fungi and the results were significant, Rodriguez says; irrespective of climate zone and soil type, when the fungi were applied to plants, crop yields increased. During low-stress growing seasons, treated seeds increased crop yields by an average of 3-5%, during high-stress growing seasons, there was an increase of up to 50%.

Entering the Market

In 2017, they commercialized their first product, BioEnsure, a fungal inoculant liquid that can be sprayed directly onto plants, either at seed stage, or when they’re fully grown. They began a partnership with an independent seed company to conduct large-scale experiments on corn and soy fields that had been damaged by heat and drought. Within just a matter of days, the plants began recovering. Not only that, but the company ended up with large yield differences between the control crops that weren’t treated and the crops that were.

“They started buying from us the next year, and now they put our product on all their seeds,” says Rodriguez.

Since 2017, the year AST went commercial, BioEnsure has been sprayed on 12 million acres in the U.S., primarily soy and corn. It’s been a difficult arena to expand into, though, due to the dynamics of large seed companies, and AST mostly takes on smaller agricultural distributors.

But while AST faces roadblocks in the U.S., its potential is being recognized abroad. In India and Africa, smallholder farmers—who bear the brunt of climate change—are already seeing yield increases of up to 60% using AST’s treatments, the company reports. According to the farmers, the quality of the yield also improved.

AST now has four products for sale, including the fungal inoculant liquid BioEnsure and BioEnsureFP—a powder version of the original.

After creating the fungal inoculant products, the AST team wanted to see if they could boost the yields that BioEnsure produced by developing a bacterial product that would act as a fertilizer, fixing atmospheric nitrogen—an essential plant nutrient—and making soil minerals such as potassium and phosphorus easier for the plant to absorb.

They came up with BioTango, a bacterial inoculant powder, and BioIQ, a blend of BioEnsure and BioTango, in powder form. All products are organic and have been found to increase crop yield and yield quality, as well as improved seed germination. AST has introduced BioTango in Ghana and found it replaced at least 50% of chemical fertilizers used by farmers. Tests on corn in Indiana showed using BioIQ increased yield by up to 15.3%, and in soy crop testing in Michigan, yield increase was 12%.

There is no shortage of farmers who would welcome yield increases like these. There are an estimated 570 million farms on the planet, and about 80% of them are operated by small landowners. So the question, Rodriguez says, becomes: “How are you going to reach 456 million farmers?”

AST doesn’t have the resources to hire a big sales team to reach that many farmers. Instead, they develop products that fit into the existing supply chain. Rather than individual farmers, they work with distributors who sell their product to farms. And they’ve worked to boost their production system so they have the capacity to produce 30 million acres worth of product each year.

This year they are beginning to work with farms in Canada, as well as branching into the country of Jordan. With further expansion into the Middle East and Africa on the horizon, Rodriguez is hoping that these humble fungi could bring about global change.

Learn more about Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies.

Author: Lucy Sheriff
Photographer: Jovelle Tamayo