WATCH IT WORK
Our fields are drying out. Watch them come back.
THE THIRST
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An illustration of the mechanism, simplified for clarity and not to scale.
CARBBIOME
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A-DIT · ADVANCED DEEP-INJECTION TECHNOLOGY
Permanent carbon removal and multi-year drought resilience, placed deep in the soil in one pass.
A-DIT meters biochar and prescribed soil amendments into a continuous engineered layer, 30 to 150 cm down. Deep placement is what makes the carbon durable and the water benefit last for years. We deliver it as a service, not a machine.
THE STAKES
Drought stopped being a bad year. It became the trend.
Soil degradation already costs the EU at least €50 billion a year. And the Mediterranean, where so much of Europe's food grows, is taking the hardest hit.
20% faster
The Mediterranean basin is warming a fifth faster than the global average, making it one of the world's main climate-change hotspots.
MedECC, First Mediterranean Assessment Report
53%
of Europe was affected by drought conditions in May 2025.
Copernicus / WMO, European State of the Climate 2025
60+ years
since a global wine harvest was as small as 2024's. The OIV points to unpredictable, extreme weather driven by climate change.
OIV, State of the World Vine and Wine Sector in 2024
~90%
of traditional wine regions in coastal and lowland Spain, Italy and Greece, and southern California, could be at risk of disappearing by 2100.
van Leeuwen et al., Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 2024
And it is accelerating.
Since 2000
Droughts are up 29% on the two decades before. And 2.3 billion people already live with water stress.
UNCCD, Drought in Numbers 2022
Every year
Between 2015 and 2019 the world lost at least 100 million hectares of healthy, productive land annually. That is twice the size of Greenland, gone in five years.
UNCCD Data Dashboard, 2023
Today
Drought costs the world economy more than US$307 billion a year.
UNCCD / ELD Initiative, 2024
By 2050
More than three people in four worldwide are projected to be affected by drought.
UNCCD Drought in Numbers; World Drought Atlas 2024
THE PROBLEM
The material works. The method doesn't.
Biochar holds both the carbon and the water that degraded soil has lost. The problem is what happens after you spread it.
Month 0: appliedMonth 9: thinningMonth 18: largely gone
Schematic illustration. Not to scale.
60–70%
of EU soils are already unhealthy. Degraded soil holds neither carbon nor water.
~18 months
until surface-spread biochar has eroded, washed off and been tilled away. Carbon that leaves the field can't be certified.
No record
of where and how much went in. Without proof, there is no premium credit.
THE DIVIDEND
What the buried band gives back.
None of this is hope. It's measured. These are biochar's effects in field trials and global meta-analyses, on the kind of tired, coarse, thirsty soils we start with. What A-DIT adds is placing it where those effects last:
+66%
more grapes from biochar plots in a non-irrigated Tuscan vineyard, measured across four harvest years. The driest years showed the biggest gains, with no change in grape quality.
Genesio, Miglietta, Baronti & Vaccari · Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 2015 · field trial
Water that stays
Sandy soils hold up to 45% more plant-available water with biochar in the profile. Crops worldwide average 20% more harvest per drop.
Geoderma 2020 · GCB Bioenergy 2021 · meta-analyses
Fertility that stops leaking
Nitrate leaching drops 13%, and past 26% in longer trials. The soil's holding capacity for nutrients rises 20%, and plant-available phosphorus multiplies 4.6-fold on average, 5.1-fold in acidic soils.
Science of the Total Environment 2019 · Biochar 2022 · Scientific Reports 2019 · meta-analyses
Soil that comes back to life
Microbial biomass grows 22%. The fungal partnerships roots drink through grow 68% in sandy soils. In trials, plant disease severity is roughly halved.
Biochar 2020 · Agronomy 2026 · Biochar 2022 · meta-analyses; disease figure from pot and greenhouse trials
Ground that holds on
Runoff falls by a quarter and erosion by a sixth. Salt-poisoned farmland yields a fifth more. And 97% of the carbon placed stays put for something like five and a half centuries.
Science of the Total Environment 2023 · Agriculture 2025 · GCB Bioenergy 2016 · meta-analyses
THE MACHINE
Every gram on record.
Prototype 1 is built for vineyards: narrow enough for the inter-row, with independent drill stations on a modular toolbar. The same platform reconfigures by shaft count, drill type and working width to match the soil, the terrain and the crop.
Interactive model of the design as it stands today. The prototype we build will differ in detail.
GPS-fixed X/Y · encoder-verified depthMetered by weight at every pointModular toolbar, independent drill stationsPlacement log generated by the machine itself
THE ENGINEERING WALKTHROUGH
Seventy seconds inside the CAD: drives, feed and augers, no narration needed.
Engineering CAD of the platform in development, not a film of a built machine. Pressing play loads the player from Wistia, which may set cookies on your device. Nothing is loaded from them until you do. See our privacy notice.
THE PLATFORM
Four things no spreader can do.
Adjustable depth, 30–150 cm
Depth prescribed per crop and soil: 30 cm for vines on shallow profiles, down to 150 cm where the water table demands it.
Multi-amendment blending
Biochar plus prescribed amendments, metered closed-loop and blended into the same band. One placement, one prescription.
Built-in MRV
The machine's own placement log is the audit trail: tamper-resistant evidence a certifier can issue against.
Biochar-agnostic
Works with any certified biochar. We own the placement layer, not the pyrolysis plant.
THE ECONOMICS
One pass, two revenue lines.
The credit pays for the operation. We place the biochar as a service, the estate pays nothing upfront, and the durable removal it creates is certified and sold. A vineyard that holds water in August; a credit that survives an audit.
2.5–2.9 t
of CO₂e removed for every tonne of biochar placed
€125–200
per tonne, the going band for durable EU-origin removals
Centuries
in the ground: 97% of biochar carbon persists, with a mean residence time near 550 years
Removal factor reflects biochar carbon content; certified figures follow the EU CRCF biochar methodology · permanence from Wang, Xiong & Kuzyakov, GCB Bioenergy 2016
First market: premium Mediterranean vineyards, olive groves and orchards, where land is worth €0.3–2.3M a hectare and every summer now runs dry. The land itself is the asset worth protecting. The service is built to issue credits under the EU's Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF), the new standard for permanent removals.
And the demand is no longer theoretical. Durable removal purchases grew at a 324% compound annual rate to 30.4 million tonnes contracted in 2025. Frontier, the advance market commitment backed by Stripe, Google and JPMorgan Chase, has committed $1.8 billion by 2040. And 86% of all durable tonnes actually delivered so far have been biochar.
CDR.fyi 2025–26 · Frontier Climate
THE PATH
Three gates, each one fundable.
- 1
Bench validation
WE ARE HEREThe deep-placement mechanism proven on the bench. Retires the primary technical risk.
- 2
One field unit
A single instrumented machine running in real soil. First paid pilots become signable.
- 3
First credits
Permanence and agronomy proven in the field; first CRCF credits issued at premium estates.
THE HORIZON
Land that was dying starts holding water again.
Across the Mediterranean, desertification is no longer a forecast; farmland is retreating in front of it. Every engineered horizon reverses the direction of travel on one hectare: water held for decades, carbon for centuries, food grown where the map said it was finished. We start in vineyards and orchards because that is where the proof pays for itself. But the machine doesn't know it's in a vineyard. Wherever soil is dying, deep placement is how you rebuild the sponge: the adsorptive moisture retention capacity the ground has lost.
First we hold the line. Then we push it back.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Eight granted in the US. Eight pending in Europe.
8
US patents granted to our licensor on the deep-injection platform: machine, method and control.
8
European applications in prosecution, Italy designated in every one.
The platform was engineered and patented in the US by our licensor. CarbBiome SRL holds the exclusive Italian licence, with contractual rights to extend to further non-US jurisdictions. Protection stands granted in the United States and pending in Europe; beyond those, one invention in the family carries national filings. Know-how developed on top is owned outright.
WHY NOW
The window just opened.
In under a year, Europe built the legal machinery for exactly what A-DIT does.
Dec 2025
The EU's first soil law enters into force. Member states must start measuring soil health (Directive 2025/2360).
Feb 2026
The world's first voluntary certification standard for permanent carbon removals is adopted, in force since May. Biochar is one of only three methods covered.
Apr 2026
The EU's 2040 climate target becomes binding law: a 90% net cut. For the first time it opens the door for domestic permanent removals to compensate hard-to-abate emissions in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS).
2026
The European Innovation Council dedicates a €50 million challenge to regenerating agricultural soils, with soil organic carbon and water retention explicitly in scope.
Behind the law sits the arithmetic: Paris-compatible pathways leave a removal gap of 5.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year in 2050, versus what countries have pledged. Those tonnes have to be placed by someone. Permanently, verifiably, at field scale.
THE ROUND
We're raising the prototype round.
It builds the first A-DIT prototype and takes it through Gate 1: the deep-placement mechanism proven on the bench, metered and logged. The UN's drought economists put the return on resilience at up to $27 for every dollar invested. If durable carbon removal belongs in your portfolio, we'd like to talk.
JOIN THE JOURNEY
If this speaks to you, we want to know you.
Maybe you grow on land that gets harder every summer. Maybe you research soil, make biochar, build machines, write policy. Or you simply refuse to watch land die. We are looking for partners on the way to global impact: growers, scientists, producers, operators, allies. Whoever you are in this story, we want to know you. We want to know all.
Some already walk with us: the engineering partners designing the first machine, and researchers in soil science and tree crops here in Italy and across Europe.
Join the journey
Or email alon.s@carbbiome.eu