Turning Farms into Carbon Capture
The next clima-tech opportunity
“To reach net-zero emissions, experts agree that we’ll not only need to massively reduce but also remove emissions from the atmosphere to the tune of 10–15 billion tonnes a year by 2050.”
Lithos Carbon allows farmers to increase their crop yield, making their farms as productive as possible and introducing another form of revenue obtained from carbon removal.
Lithos transports this basalt to farmers, who use it in place of ag-lime to deacidify the soil. According to Frontier’s (an advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal backed by companies that use Stripe Climate), Lithos’s early farmer partners have already reported healthier soil pH and yield improvements by switching from ag-liming to ground basalt.
Litho determines a farmer’s yield by applying their proprietary machine learning algorithms to site-specific soil samples, optimising a unique application strategy for carbon dioxide capture, crop yields, and soil health for the farmland.
The three founders, Mary, Chris, and Noah, incorporated the company in 2022 and are on track to make exponential strides in carbon removal.
The team at Lithos Carbon is working with farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast, where they’ve already captured over 2,000 tonnes of carbon this year and partnered with some of the world’s most recognisable brands through Frontier — Stripe, , Alphabet, and so on.
Most recently, Frontiers signed a deal to pay Lithos $57.1 million to remove 154,240 tonnes of CO2 between 2024 and 2028. It is massively compelling because Lithos builds on top of existing industrial and agricultural practices, enabling the company to scale and reduce costs quickly.
If you are interested in how carbon capture works, Lithos has written a fantastic deep dive here.
It has three main comparative advantages:
Reliable: They are reliable by working with growers to spread and fine-tune each field for guaranteed crop performance. Rather than relying on guesswork, the solution Lithos has developed is based on a decade of research and groundwork for pH regulation. By fully replacing ag-lime, they reduce reliance on fertilizers that fluctuate wildly in price, giving farmers peace of mind.
🚀 Rapid In exposed natural rock, this process takes thousands of years. On average, enhanced weathering via dust still takes 15–50 years. Lithos slashes the wait for carbon removal. They optimize by field-by-field, hence capturing ~70% of the carbon in year 1 and the rest in a couple growing seasons.
✅ Flexible. According to the founders, they learned in years of research that “we found that countless parameters complicate reaction kinetics — even between parts of a single farm. Their platform is trained against real-world data to speed up removal while guaranteeing crop performance. The platform slots into growers’ existing practices with no change.”
Furthermore, I believe that with Lithos proprietary technology, there is a massive growing demand for sustainable climate solutions. Lithos is a company with huge growth potential, and since the existing infrastructure of United States farmland is already equipped with rock dust spreaders, Lithos can scale fast because they can use those rock dust spreaders.
