Finding hope in the dust: how we built a climate start-up through droughts, fires and a pandemic
By Guy Hudson, CEO Loam Bio
I was in a ute in the middle of a dry paddock in country Australia, a dog-eared copy of a damning climate change report sitting on the dashboard.
Agronomist Guy Webb was driving me around drought-ravaged farms in NSW, as we talked about the effects of climate change on agriculture. With his uniquely robust optimism, he told me about how he and Trangie farmer Mick Wettenhall were building on Sydney University research into how certain soil microbes can address global warming and restore farmland.
The heat, plumes of dust and the IPCC report were stark reminders of a world in crisis. But in that moment, I felt more hope than I ever had before. After a decade working in the climate space, I was convinced that this solution was a key part of how we address climate change: an approach that is low cost, quickly scalable and high impact.
I started reading everything I could about the incredible microbial ecosystem, and its role in influencing the carbon cycle. It is a world beneath our feet that has the power to save our own.
Four years on, we are Loam Bio. Our team researches microbes across four labs and trials them in about 25 field sites spread over two continents. We are a group of scientists, agronomists, farmers and entrepreneurs united in a mission to address climate change and increase farm productivity.
We’ve developed microbial technology that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it stably in agricultural soil. Carbon can reside within the soil for centuries or longer. By identifying and applying the right microbes we can increase the quantities of carbon in the soil and increase how long it stays there. The world doesn’t have to wait for change — our prototype products are already in the ground storing carbon, improving soil health and boosting crop yield.
We have been blown away by the people who have backed the growth of our business. We recently closed a AUD $40 million Series A led by Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, and including Horizon Ventures, CSIRO’s Main Sequence, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Acre Venture Partners, Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes’ Grok Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and Fiona McKean and Tobi Lütke’s Thistledown Capital. This group has helped us go further faster, with perspectives honed through building world-changing companies.
We’re a long way from that dusty paddock and it’s down to our team. They are an amazing group of people with diverse experiences but one common attitude. They don’t just watch the news in frustration, but ask the question “what if I can do something to change this?”
We persevered to build Loam while the worst drought in living memory raged, while bushfires destroyed 18 million hectares of Australian land, and while a pandemic shut the world down.
This collision of planetary catastrophes only propelled us further along and increased our sense of urgency. The bushfires and the drought, which sent smoke and dust into our cities, served as a wake-up call to metropolitan communities and corporate Australia.
We were inundated with emails from companies asking what they could do to help us scale our technology further faster. So, we’d brush the outback dirt off our clothes, and meet with executives in the city setting up some groundbreaking collaborations (more on those soon…)
The global pandemic only sped up our work, as our committed team worked in socially-distanced shifts around the clock to build out our microbial library and develop our understanding of the role these organisms can play in enhancing a plants natural capacity to store carbon long-term.
Since raising our seed round led by Horizons Ventures in early 2020, we’ve achieved so much. Through field trials and partnerships with leading universities we’ve validated our early hypothesis and confirmed that our technology works in the real world with the potential to remove gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere in a matter of years rather than decades. We’ve discovered many organisms that are new to science (and had fun naming them). We’ve developed a world-class bioinformatics platform to help us understand how and why our microbes store CO2 in stable forms. We’ve built a tight network of forward-thinking farmers to trial and advocate for our products. Every day, we’re breaking new ground.
But it’s now that the hard work really begins.
Our researchers are working hard on understanding the underlying mechanisms behind how the microbial world influences carbon storage. In turn, by providing a better understanding of the system we will be able to transform the way soil carbon is perceived in the global carbon markets. We will collaborate with corporate offtakers who will serve as catalytic partners, paying farmers to build natural capital, improve their soil health, and increase soil carbon at scale.
An enormous task lies ahead and we’re taking it on. Some might say we’re too ambitious. But given the scale of the challenge we are facing, how can we not be?
Congratulations on securing funds in your recent series B investment round.
You mentioned the "IPCC report" in the above text. Are you referring to the IPCC Sixth Assessment? I guess based on the date of this blog post, you are talking about the Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.
I have not read this report, but IPCC has made clear for decades the need for accelerated sequestration of atmospheric CO2. Was there anything new in the report that was unexpected? Also, are there any global policy recommendations IPCC made that, if implemented, would make Loam's intellectual property commercially viable, at say, a faster time table.
I would think that your early stage investors are essentially placing bets now that policy changes will be put in place, at least across the developed world, that will incentivize agricultural carbon sequestration, which would be enabled by your IP.
Also wondering; How do you plan to defend yourselves legally from prosecution on criminal collusion and racketeering charges that may arise from executing on your current business model? There may be both criminal and civil cases made in the future making such claims that you are racketeering on taxpayers and colluding with governments and NGOs to extort payments for "carbon credits".