A conversation with Kristofer Covey , forester-turned-entrepreneur and c0-founder of The Soil Inventory Project , on why measuring soil at scale could unlock billions in environmental and financial value.

Michael Zakaras: We hear a lot about climate, and a fair amount about food and agriculture — but soil tends to be invisible. Why should the average person care about what's happening beneath our feet?

Kris Covey: Soil is the conduit for almost everything a plant needs. The sun supplies energy, and soil delivers the rest: the water, the nutrients, and the biology that drives agricultural outcomes. How we manage land affects the soil, which in turn influences how abundant production is, and how stable the yield is through things like drought. But we also get carbon sequestration, and if you have healthy soils, you need fewer added nutrients to get the same yield, which reduces input costs. And when nutrients aren’t taken up by the plant, where are they going? They’re washing into streams. So we’re talking about water quality and biodiversity, too. The global environmental problems associated with soil — agriculture, climate, water, biodiversity — are inherently linked back to soil performance.

Zakaras: So what's actually happening to the world's soils, and how big is the problem?

Covey: We’re essentially mining productivity rather than managing this system sustainably. When you till, you get a big boost in microbial activity. Those microbes consume organic matter, where carbon is stored. That boosts productivity, but soils become degraded. We’ve layered that heavy dependence on fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. They’re really good at making soils productive, but the system becomes dependent on them to maintain yields. It’s a lot like steroids. They make you look strong, but they leave your body prone to breakdown, and when they’re removed, performance drops off very rapidly — as opposed to a tuned athlete ready for sustained performance.

Zakaras: Why has measuring soil health and soil carbon at scale been so difficult, and what are you doing differently?

Covey: The system is enormous — a billion acres in the US alone. It’s highly variable spatially, it changes through time, and it’s hard to see into soil from above. With forests, you can use satellites. With soil, you can only see the very top layer, so you have to get out there and dig holes. That means moving people and equipment around, taking samples, and getting them through a lab process. On an individual sample, there isn’t a lot of value. It’s only when you amass knowledge that it starts to have value, and a lot of that value is societal. Forest inventory, by contrast, is a very large government enterprise. The US Forest Service spent the better part of a century building it, and we spend tens of millions of dollars a year valuing forests as a strategic asset. Soil doesn’t get the same attention.

At The Soil Inventory Project, we’re reducing the cost of inventory — low-cost field hardware, automated sampling design, and a mobile application so people can navigate quickly to the right place to get a sample. We’re also focused on increasing the value of that inventory. Instead of just seeing what’s in your soil, we want to put that information in context, the way a utility bill compares your energy use to neighbors. And we’re building models that can say predictively: take on this practice, and here’s the set of outcomes you should expect on yield, water quality, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. That lets a producer stack farm outcomes on one balance sheet.

Zakaras: Regenerative agriculture has grown from a niche idea into a real movement. How does your work change what farmers, companies and policymakers can actually do with it?

Covey: Regenerative agriculture has a really great story. You adopt a basket of practices — reduced tillage, cover cropping, better nutrient management, more intensive rotational grazing — and that has a positive impact on your soil. You’re sequestering carbon, soaking up water like a sponge, holding onto nutrition, building drought resilience, using fewer inputs and getting more biodiversity. That story is directionally true, and it’s why people are excited. But producers are running businesses, and if they can’t make the loan payment, they're not in business anymore. We need to move from telling stories to providing actionable, investable information: farmers investing in practices, corporates investing in supply-chain resilience, ecosystem-service markets paying not just for practice adoption but for outcomes. Right now, we mostly pay people to put down cover crops. For everyone through that chain to invest more, we need to define the expected return on that investment. That's an inventory and modeling problem.

Zakaras: If you succeed in building a national — even global — soil inventory, what becomes possible that isn't possible today?

Covey: The potential is enormous. I think about a particular example a lot, because almost everyone in the story gets the opposite of what they want. Consider “low stable zones,” parts of a field that underperform every year. Farmers keep fertilizing them hoping to boost production. The yield never comes, the input money is burned, and the nitrogen the crop didn’t use washes into our waterways. With better soil information, we could incentivize better decisions, rather than re-investing in poor outcomes for everyone. And that’s just one example. If we put soil performance on the farm balance sheet, we can align a broad suite of incentives around it. Ultimately, I see an enormous climate impact, better food security and reduced tropical deforestation. Public agriculture data remains an under-resourced area. Low tens of millions of dollars in investment could unlock tens of billions in environmental value and impact.

Zakaras: You came to this as a scientist and entrepreneur. What was the moment you realized research alone wasn’t enough — that this needed a new institution or system?

Covey: I’m a forester by training, not a soil scientist. We’d come off a project counting the earth’s three trillion trees and were working with ranchers who kept saying, “If I get more organic matter into my soil, I can carry more cattle and be more financially sustainable.” So we went to get the soil data the way we’d gotten forest data, and realized: it’s not there. At first we focused on getting lab costs out of the mix. Eventually we realized the real problem wasn’t lab cost, it was the sheer scale of agriculture and the lack of coordinated inventory.

What the system needs is a trusted entity providing baseline information that a whole ecosystem can build on. That’s what makes forest ecosystem-service markets work. It just didn’t exist for agriculture. Take a carbon market: when someone buys a ton of carbon, nobody backs up a dump truck full of carbon to your house. You're purchasing a ton of trust, trust that a ton was sequestered that wouldn't have been otherwise.

Zakaras: Is there one thing you believed about soil, agriculture or climate when you started this work that you no longer believe?

Covey: I thought this was going to be easy. Coming from forestry, where this just works, I assumed that if you pointed at it and said, “Look how well this works,” people would say, “Obviously we should do that.” That was ridiculous. One of my favorite forestry professors used to say, “Managing trees is the easy part, people are the real problem.” I don’t think the biggest challenge is the measurement system or the modeling. It’s largely a social, political and economic problem of coordinating people with divergent interests. If we could get everybody to take one step forward together, the problem would go away very quickly. I started out focused on the technical aspects of inventory and now that takes up very little of my thinking.

Kris Covey is an Ashoka Fellow .

Michael Zakaras leads Ashoka US.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.