Soil Full of Surprises: A Fungus Which Feeds Plants Can Save the Planet

The climate clock is ticking and there is no longer any doubt: reduction of carbon emissions, important and necessary as it is, will not be sufficient. To reverse the direction of climate change and distance ourselves from the fast-approaching point of no return, we need solutions that not only decrease the negative impact of human activity each year, but also turn back the clock and repair the ongoing damage inflicted on the planet since the Industrial Revolution.

One effective solution, it turns out, has been lying under our feet all the time, simply waiting to be discovered. It was unveiled at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El Sheik, November 2022, by the Israeli company behind it, Groundwork BioAg.

After almost nine years providing farmers worldwide with high-quality and effective products, Groundwork BioAg is now offering an environmental game-changer— reintroducing the ancient fungus, mycorrhiza, to rehabilitate the soil. The fine hairs of the microscopic mycorrhiza attach themselves to plant root systems, expanding and connecting with one another to create a vast root-ecosystem that taps nutrients otherwise out of reach. In return, the fungi feed on carbon-based sugars, which the plant produces and transfers to the fungi. This natural root-fungus symbiosis formed the foundation of almost every fertile soil in nature for 400 million years. The plows of cultivated agriculture destroy these beneficial fungi, however, leaving only fixed carbon behind.

Enriching cultivated soil with mycorrhiza has become a holy grail of agriculture, the dream of every agronomist. For the past quarter-century, these fungi have been studied at Israel’s Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research, its scientists working to formulate it for research in symbiosis with other plants. It was against this background that Groundwork BioAg was established in 2014. The new company expanded the research, commercialized the product, optimized and added new production methods, identified its most cost-effective use and began marketing mycorrhiza to farmers.

“Our guiding principle is that the product makes zero change to the way farmers work,” says Groundwork BioAg’s Chief Growth Officer and cofounder, Dan Grotsky. “All our products slot into the grower’s standard operating procedure, and are attractive in terms of cost.”

The most common way of using the new product is seed treatment, a technique already in regular use with field crops. To the pesticides and insecticides with which farmers regularly coat their seeds, they add Groundwork BioAg’s unique product. “For the manufacturer, this type of biological seed treatment is more complex and costly than chemical seed treatments,” says Grotsky. “But for the farmers, it’s simple: they take our product in either powder or liquid form and just add it to the tank where they dress their seeds.”

Since its founding in 2014, Groundwork BioAg products have been used in one million hectares (2.5 million acres) in 15 countries. It has produced increased yields, savings in fertilization costs and protection from crop stress, all in a natural and environmentally friendly way. Recently, another major benefit has emerged from under the radar (under the plant?) — of benefit to all of humankind.

The glue of carbon to soil

“With the increase of worldwide concern about carbon, we decided take a deeper look,” says Grotsky. “We’ve always known that mycorrhiza has a role in the carbon cycle, but it wasn’t until we examined the symbiosis process itself that the penny dropped, and we understood its very great significance!”

Grotsky shows a photo of cultivated Brazilian fields, some with mycorrhizae-treated soybean plants and some without. The difference is strikingly visible in the color of the crops. And more than this: while the plant profits from the natural infusion of mycorrhiza close to its roots, the fungus fixes the carbon, preventing much of its return to the air during repeated plowing.

“During the past 250 years, modern agriculture has released some 800 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the soil — 800 billion tons! — back into the atmosphere, an amount almost equal to all carbon emissions from fossil fuels during the same period,” says Grotsky. “Mycorrhizal Carbon solves the problem of excess of carbon in the atmosphere and its deficit in the soil: plants photosynthize carbon, and mycorrhiza fixes that carbon in place. That is, if we return agricultural land to its natural state, we not only reduce carbon emissions, we make good the centuries of damage we’ve wrought.”

This natural solution, he stresses, is not academic, theoretical or futuristic. It has been proved in experiments conducted by Groundwork BioAg this past year in both Israel and the US, which measured Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) before and after the treatment with Rootella, one of its leading products. The effect, reports Grotsky, was far more rapid and at a far higher ratio than in any other model of regenerative agriculture, which is known to fix up to 2 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare of land (0,8 tons per acre), requiring complete change in the farmer’s operating methods over a minimum five years.

“The ideal is that the whole world switches to regenerative agriculture, which preserves land in its natural form, avoids plowing, complex cultivation, chemicals and stripping the land bare,” he says. “But this, of course, means that farmers abandon everything they know, ways of working passed down the generations, so it can’t be done at the moment. It’s why regenerative agriculture comprises only 0.7 percent of global agriculture, and won’t exceed 20 percent by 2050, by even the most optimistic estimate. The mycorrhiza solution bucks this trend. It puts rejuvenating agriculture at the front door for immediate use, without requiring without sweeping change.”

The big bonus: carbon credits

Putting the carbon genie back in the bottle will, we know, make a huge contribution to the planet. It will also be highly profitable. To collect and reclaim the vast amounts of carbon dioxide already released into the atmosphere, we need not only passive responses (not cutting down a forest, for example) but also proactive initiatives. Taking full advantage of photosynthesis, turning cultivated agricultural land into land that stores carbon are solutions that clearly meet the proactive definition — similar to the effective ’blue carbon’ response in the oceans. Groundwork BioAg’s solution thus rewards not only its developer as the IP owner, but even more so the agriculturalists and entrepreneurs by giving them quality carbon credits that can be traded (there are dedicated funds for this) to companies and countries that need them. Tech giants, banks, Disney, S&P 500 companies are among those who buy hundreds of thousands of credit units every year to keep within their carbon quotas. The US and EU award grants for solutions like these.

And it is already happening. This year, in a world first, carbon credits are being issued for a US project using Groundwork BioAg mycorrhizae, in “likely the first credit ever given for a mycorrhiza product,” according to Grotsky. “With the million hectares we’ve covered to date, we’ve already sequestered several megatons of carbon in the soil, and are on our way to sequestering gigatons within a decade. These are vast volumes.”

The hallway conversation that spawned the revolution

Grotsky, a former software and AI professional, remembers the exact moment he decided to focus on sustainability. “As a child, I’d promised myself to leave the world a better place than how I found it,” he says. “In 2008, it took me five minutes to decide to change my career path to honor that promise.” In 2013, as head of the Israel alumni club of the MIT Sloan School of Business, Grotsky brought in serial entrepreneur Dr. Yossi Kofman as a lecturer. From the world of microchips and hardware, Kofman was interested in clean-tech.

Grotsky, at that time, was engaged in World Bank-funded agricultural projects in Moldova. “Chatting with Yossi after the lecture, I told him I saw great potential in plant nutrition — particularly in reducing the huge waste in chemical fertilizers, most of which pollute rather than feed the plant. We decided to look for a way to feed plants more efficiently. Soil is a world of itself, and we’re only now beginning to understand what’s happening inside it.”

Shortly afterward, Grotsky met Volcani Institute researcher Danny Levy at the Heschel Center for Sustainability, and he, too, entered the story. “Levy lectured about mycorrhiza, and you can say I fell in love with a fungus!” says Grotsky.

The three future partners sat down for coffee, examined the numbers lengthwise breadthwise and especially depth-wise, and realized they were onto something. They quit their jobs, obtained an exclusive license from Volcani and set up Groundwork BioAg. Kofman is its CEO, Grotsky its CGO and Levy its CTO. They brought in Hanan Dor as CCO (formerly CEO of ICL Specialty Fertilizers) and Bari Ruimy as CFO.

Today, Groundwork BioAg employs 70 people, including biologists, microbiologists, chemists, agronomists and more. Company headquarters are in Moshav Mazor near Petach Tikva, there is a production site in the northern Arava, and offices in the US, China, India and Brazil, where they recently acquired a stake in their exclusive importer, NovaTero. To date, Groundwork BioAg has raised $40 million in venture capital, the most recent round led by Climate Innovation Capital of Canada, with Israel’s MoreVC Fund, America’s Ibex Fund and Middleland Capital, Germany’s BASF and the HSBC Climate Fund.

The double gospel

“Our field is still in its infancy,” says Grotsky. “The big money will come from the market, from the private sector. Our business model has been proved on a million hectares of crops. For the private sector, we must now add a revenue stream model in the form of carbon credits, which will enable us to raise the necessary capital. We’re becoming a carbon credit company, which from the farmers’ viewpoint, is literally printing money.”

Most companies involved in bio-agriculture, he points out, invest millions, employ a wide range of PhDs and spend years searching for an organism or gene or enzyme. “With us, it’s been the other way around,” he says. “We started with the product — a fungus that everyone knows works — but no one knew how to produce it. Most of our R&D has been around this, looking for a simple and cost-effective formulation that will work on the ground. And we found it. Today we have a scalable production system that can produce billions and even trillions of spores.”

Distribution remains largely through existing dealers and channels. “Online sales are less common and our product isn’t yet seen as a commodity like chemical fertilizer… but we expect it to become standard in the next few years,” he says. Retail sales do exist for the cannabis market, on platforms such as Amazon, Walmart and eBay as well as on websites.

“In carbon sequestration, the major impact will be on field crops, such as as corn, soybeans and wheat, where many hectares can be covered and truly influence the future of the planet for all of us,” he continues. “That’s where we’re directing most of our effort. We believe that the double gospel of agriculture and environment will manifest there in its fullest force.”

in collaboration with Groundwork BioAg