Anton Yarotsky participated as a speaker at Climate Change Summit in Bucharest on October 19th, where he shared his findings on sustainable agriculture as a Ukrainian farmer who noticed his yields weren't as productive as they used to be in the past few years.

"I'm a guy who's affected by climate change. Five years ago, I started to notice that we stopped receiving the yields we wanted to. Farming becomes more and more risky", he explained.

Since his farming practices at the time were similar to those of other farmers in his region, but even worldwide, he started to look at what he might be doing wrong.

He realized that the soil and the water were some of the affected resources that are crucial to agriculture, no matter where a certain farm is located. So, he started measuring how his practices at the time affected the local resources he was using.

"If you are introducing some regenerative agriculture practices, you have to measure what you're doing and understand if you are doing the right things or not", he added.

The next step for him was looking into the tools that could give him a better perspective on carbon emissions, on the health of the soil and the efficiency of his machinery, to name a few.

To help other farmers with measuring their impact and find out where they can improve and what changes would have the most meaningful impact, Anton launched Circl.ag, an MRV (measurement, reporting and verification) tool for the farming sector.

Two of the issues with MRV tools mentioned by EU authorities and by Anton, as well, are scaling the instruments and also the price of the operations can be high.

"For farmers, it's very intriguing that you need to spend 50% of your costs measuring your climate results, without making more money with your products or yields", the founder of Circl.ag explained.

The entire monitoring in one place

Since regenerative agriculture and science-based monitoring already benefit from a number of things, such as remote sensing, satellite monitoring and machine learning algorithms, the startups working with them are usually focusing on one at a time.

Thus, Anton thought about combining all these solutions into one and offering farmers a multitude of agricultural monitoring and measuring solutions tailored to their needs.

Due to the fact that farming became more expensive in Ukraine and fertilizer prices have soared in the past years, the founder of Circl.ag proposed and started implementing more natural solutions to increase yield productivity.

Experts say that about half of farming's emissions come from using too many nitrogen-based fertilizers, which can be as much as 300 times more potent when it comes to warming the planet compared to carbon dioxide over the course of 100 years.

Cover crops, used to maintain the health of the soil when it isn't used for growing vegetables, for example, doesn't capture as much carbon as it was initially believed. At the same time, some farmers could be tempted to use more farming land as a compensation for the initial loss in productivity, caused by switching to more environmentally-friendly farming practices.

The solutions proposed by Circl.ag experts can be easily integrated with other farm management systems and farmers can easily assess their impact on the health of the soil and how it's carbon levels could affect the productivity of the yields.