Soil carbon pilots feel like a safe choice. They aren't.
Why soil carbon pilots are not a reliable foundation for building a SOC strategy
Imagine you are renovating your home.
You’ve spent weeks, months, or even years evaluating contractors, sourcing materials, gathering inspiration from other projects. Now you are finally ready to act, but instead of planning the full renovation project, you decide it's probably more sensible to replace a single tile in the bathroom to “see how it goes.”
All of this time, money, and effort and in the end you haven’t learned much. That one tile wont motivate you to continue on with the rest of the house. Worse, it gives you a false sense of progress, all while the rest of the house keeps aging.
This is exactly what many companies are doing with soil carbon initiatives.
They launch small pilot projects covering 500 or maybe 1,000 hectares to “test” whether they should commit to soil organic carbon (SOC) as part of their sustainability strategy. It feels safe. It feels prudent. But it’s often the exact opposite: slow, misleading, and surprisingly expensive.
And in most cases, it sets them up to miss their 2030 goals entirely.
1. Small Projects, Big Costs
SOC quantification doesn’t scale the way people think it does.
The cost isn’t driven just by the number of hectares, it’s driven by soil carbon variability, which determines how many soil samples are needed. A 500-hectare pilot might still require high sampling density, and the price per hectare can easily land around €600. Scale that up to 50,000 hectares, and that cost can drop to €10–20 per hectare, thanks to provider efficiencies, better model calibration, and amortized effort.
As the project gets larger, two things happen:
- Sampling providers can operate more efficiently and reduce per-hectare rates.
- Modeling accuracy improves. SOC models, whether biogeochemical, process beside, or statistical, become more robust with larger datasets. That means lower error rates and more useful insights.
Most importantly, small pilots don’t expose the true cost structure of SOC projects. They overrepresent risk and underrepresent opportunity.
2. Delay Is More Expensive Than Failure
If your pilot starts in 2025, your initial results might not be ready until 2026 or even 2027. That leaves you just a few years before 2030 to scale, implement changes, and report outcomes.
In other words: a two-year pilot can cost you half your runway.
Depending on the quantification approach and project specifics, you likely won’t get the full picture of a pilot until after 5 years. A costly pilot could misrepresent the full outcomes of your project and waiting to scale initiatives until after 5 years will make it impossible to reach 2030 SOC sequestration goals.
The longer companies wait, the harder it becomes to hit targets, and the more expensive carbon removal becomes. Ernst & Young expects high-quality carbon credits to grow scarce and more expensive over time. Companies that wait may lose out on early-action incentives and price advantages worth millions of euros annually.
Acting now isn’t just about credibility. It’s about avoiding a rush that will cost you more later.
3. Pilots Can Mislead More Than They Inform
Replacing a single tile won’t tell you how good your new bathroom will be. Likewise, a small-scale pilot rarely reflects what a full-scale SOC project will look like: financially, operationally, or scientifically.
Small pilots:
- Fail to capture accurate soil carbon variability
- Lack statistical power
- Risk confirming biases based on unrepresentative data
This leads to a bigger danger: companies draw the wrong conclusions. They may double down on ineffective practices, or worse, abandon soil carbon entirely, because the pilot didn’t “work.”
Instead, companies should use scalable data sources upfront, like satellite imagery and machine learning, to estimate SOC potential across regions. These remote models help prioritize actions and give early insight into what changes will deliver impact. More importantly, they allow you to act with confidence at scale- not guesswork.
The Path Forward
If you want to meet your climate targets, don’t settle for replacing a tile. Renovate the house.
That means skipping the unnecessary pilot and moving straight to scientifically rigorous planning at scale. Leverage remote sensing. Build a robust sampling strategy. Think like a project developer, not just a risk manager.
Because in 2030, nobody will say, “We wish we had waited longer to start.”
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