Pluton Biosciences Microbial Cover Crops

Soil degradation hurts farmers by reducing yields. It also releases gases that cause climate change and nutrient runoff that damages waterways.

Pluton has developed several unique microbial consortia that enhance soil health by storing carbon and nitrogen, and which can easily be applied with existing grower equipment without additional passes.

Applied globally, we can remove up to 40% of CO2 emitted all while creating a low-cost carbon cash crop for the 570M farms worldwide.

More than 50% of US land is devoted to agriculture, with nearly 400 million acres of cropland and production worth $136B. However, this economic powerhouse leads to the negative externality of environmental harm, taking the form of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), erosion, and fertilizer runoff. In the US, agriculture is responsible for 10% of planet-warming GHG emissions. The USDA estimates that the impacts of soil loss cost the US economy $44B annually. In addition, unstable soil environments allow the leaching of nitrate and phosphate into drinking water and bodies of water, both coastal and inland, where they lead to toxic algal blooms that harm public health and natural ecosystems. A hectare of farmland may lose 5-12 tons of soil per year even under “standard” conditions, costing farmers around 15 bushels per year in reduced yield. Soil conservation practices, such as conservation tillage in combination with traditional cover crops can drastically reduce this rate of soil loss. Cover crops absorb carbon and stabilize soil, but conventional cover crops are costly, require extra field passes, and only work in climates with long shoulder seasons. A microbial cover crop can address these issues, bringing the benefits of cover crops to more growers.

Pluton’s advanced Micromining® process, which enables rapid and targeted isolation of microbes and microbial communities for specific applications, has isolated several unique consortia of microbes to address the problems associated with soil loss and climate change. Each of Pluton’s four initial products are tailored to specific seasons, can be applied on existing field passes with existing equipment, and solve specific grower challenges. These products, collectively constituting Pluton’s portfolio of Microbial Cover Crops (MCCs), include the following:

• A photosynthetic MCC that sequesters 1-2 tons of CO2 per acre during the shoulder season while also fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere to enrich soil.

• An MCC specifically tailored to no-till farms, which helps return nutrients and carbon from crop residues to the soil without the need for mechanical tillage. This helps enrich soil, increase spring soil temperatures to allow earlier planting, and reduce fungal pathogen loads.

• A phosphate solubilizing MCC that helps to make unavailable forms of phosphorus in soil available to plants. Sometimes called Legacy Phosphorus, many fields contain 10-50 years-worth of insoluble phosphorus locked up in the soil.

• A second photosynthetic MCC that uses wavelengths of light plants transmit to continue sequestering carbon during the growing season. 

Pluton’s Microbial Cover Crops (MCCs) are marketed to serve farmers directly in several unique ways. When farmers use Pluton’s MCCs, there are also significant benefits to the neighbors of farms and the public. The public is impacted by climate change and water quality, while also consuming the food, fuel, and fiber produced on farms. This provides for a wide net of benefits from MCCs across the entire population.  

Initially, the MCCs provide farmers with several important benefits. They improve soil quality, reduce the need for expensive and environmentally damaging fertilizer inputs, increase yields and profits, and improve the long-term viability of their businesses by preserving their greatest investment, the soil. In addition, MCCs can be an additional action farmers can take to improve the carbon sequestration capacity of their land, making them eligible to sell carbon credits through platforms like those offered by Indigo Ag and Bayer. This can represent an additional income of $15-30/acre/yr at current prices, and is expected to increase as carbon markets become more widespread in the US.  

Three of the four MCCs either directly sequester carbon into the soil, help farmers to use practices like no-till that sequester carbon, or have both benefits. The exception is the phosphate solubilizing MCC, which allows farmers to reduce phosphate cost and can be combined with carbon sequestering MCCs. Carbon sequestration also improves soil organic carbon (SOC), building soil to counteract erosion and maintaining its structure. Furthermore, one MCC, which both sequesters carbon and fixes nitrogen, improves soil fertility through carbon and nitrogen.

The public also has a stake in the use of eco-friendly MCCs. By stabilizing soil, improving no-till adoption, sequestering carbon dioxide from the air, and reducing fertilizer inputs, these products protect precious water, air, and soil resources. The soil benefits allow the public to enjoy clean, unpolluted water that is not poisoned by excessive algal blooms or directly by toxic nitrate contamination. They also ensure that soil resources will be available to this and future generations for food production, providing increased food security to the world’s population. Furthermore, the carbon-sequestering MCCs remove carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas driving global climate change. This will help the entire population by taking steps towards limiting the amount of warming, which has myriad benefits including food and water security. 

Healthy Ecosystems require that agricultural practices support global sustainability of soils, water, and air. The problems of soil damage, carbon emissions, and runoff from agriculture leads to significant degradation of natural environments, which hurts public health as well. In addition to helping address public environmental quality issues, we are also helping farmers to run more profitable and sustainable businesses. Soil is a farmer’s biggest investment, since the key to supporting healthy crops is healthy soil. By building and protecting the soil, Microbial Cover Crops improve crop yields while reducing inputs. They also allow farmers to get paid for capturing carbon.

The Microbial Cover Crop (MCC) product suite is currently in laboratory-scale prototype testing. We have a developed platform, Micromining®, which we have employed to select product candidates in a hypothesis-driven and targeted manner or are now employing for such selections. Through our collaboration with Bayer, we have several candidate consortia currently in the scaling assessment phase. The MCC product suite is made up of four components, expected to be provided by four microbial consortia.  

1) The fixing of nitrogen and carbon during the shoulder season, is part of the Bayer collaboration.  

2) The stover degradation project, the subject of an NSF SBIR proposal, has just entered the selection phase.  

3-4) The phosphate solubilization and in-season carbon are entering selection using our established Micromining approach. Overall, we feel the product suite is beyond the concept stage, but we must optimize the scaling of our solution before moving onto the pilot stage.

Pluton’s core approach to discovering and applying microbes is unique and the key driver of innovation in its products. By leveraging entire populations, Pluton takes advantage of existing biodiversity and novelty found in nature and is able to target specific outcomes much more quickly than competitors. Pluton’s Microbial Cover Crops are innovative relative to existing solutions because Pluton’s products are tailor made for specific applications, are inexpensive to apply, can be applied with existing equipment, and complement multiple existing crops.  

Agricultural biologicals are a burgeoning market, valued at $7.4B with a CAGR of over 13%, according to the iSelect Fund. However, in this space, Pluton’s hypothesis-directed approach to microbial community selection to solve specific problems in agriculture is unique. Our solutions are therefore unique as well. Instead of painstakingly teasing microbes apart from their natural populations, our approach allows us to take advantage of the natural stability, novelty, and productivity of microbial communities. As we have applied this approach to multiple problems in agriculture, we have found that the products themselves can have unique functions that are not found in single isolates. The MCCs aim to target this useful multitude of biological activities that can be accomplished by a single community. The end result will be a simple product for farmers to apply that helps them built their soil, reduce fertilizer requirements, and get paid for storing carbon all while protecting the environment and mitigating climate change. None of our competitors can boast such a unique array of functions.

Since the Pluton Microbial Cover Crops (MCCs) are still in development, they do not currently serve any customers. However, we expect to begin greenhouse testing later this year, and following greenhouse tests, we plan to begin limited field trials in 2022. We expect to have perhaps a dozen growers, in a range of 10-100 acres, using our product one year from today as initial alpha testers. However, from there, we will begin scaling to beta testers, several hundred acres per test, and continue expanding. At the 5 years out mark, we expect to have a released MCC product suite on 100 million acres of farmland across the US. For reference, we grow corn on 90 million acres currently, but there are nearly 900 million acres in some form of agricultural production.  

Because a key focus of the MCC product suite is the sequestration of carbon dioxide from the air to help mitigate climate change, the widespread use of our product will also absorb vast amounts of carbon from the air, positively impacting all people on the planet. In fact, if our product were applied to 100 million acres of agricultural land and can absorb 1.7 tons of CO2/acre/yr, we could annually sequester 0.17 gigatons of CO2, about 2.6% of 2019 US emissions of the gas, or a quarter of agriculture’s contribution.

Pluton’s Microbial Cover Crops (MCCs) address Goals 1 (no poverty), 2 (zero hunger), 3 (good health and well-being), 6 (clean water & sanitation), 8 (decent work and economic growth), 12 (responsible consumption and production), 13 (climate action), and 15 (life on land). As the MCCs enter field testing and product rollout, we will continue to collect data to monitor metrics related to these goals.  

The most robust of these measurements will be widespread elemental, chemical, and microbial soil testing. We are currently in discussions with a potential partner (name is confidential for now) who already has the resources to do widespread physical testing of soils. Soil tests are useful because we can monitor the storage of carbon, the solubilization/mobilization of phosphorus, the fixation of nitrogen, and the overall soil quality this way. In early tests especially, it will be difficult to measure impacts on global CO2 or water quality, but soil tests let us assess how much carbon we have captured and how much soil protection is occurring.  

In addition, we will work with our farmer partners to collect data about any changes in practices our products have allowed them to make. For instance, a grower may be able to switch from conventional tillage to no-till using our products, which has a quantified benefit for water and carbon sequestration. They may also reduce additions of nitrogen and phosphorus, which is a key step to protecting water quality. 

Full Time: 12

Part-time / Contract: 4

Pluton’s founding science team – Drs. Goldman, Guggisberg, and Beckman – bring complimentary expertise necessary to build our discovery platform: Microbiology, Biochemistry, Molecular Genetics. Narzinski provides the process engineering, Schuster the data science, and Walch the entrepreneurial experience.  Dr. Ben Wolf, our lead scientist on Microbial Cover Crops, is a Microbiologist with expertise in selecting and growing photosynthetic microbes. Dr. Wolf has also run an indoor farm.    

Growers – the farmers – are the customer for MCCs. Pluton is based in St. Louis, Missouri, in the heart of the Midwestern farm belt. Dr. Goldman has worked with farmers directly throughout his career and is keenly aware of the challenges farmers face to make a living. Mr. Walch’s former company, a regional Midwestern parcel service, specialized in serving rural towns. From this experience, he appreciates the economic and social needs of rural communities.  Combined, the team is committed to creating products that fight global environmental concerns while promoting local economic opportunity for farmers and the communities that support them.  Socially, especially in the United States, bringing a solution to climate change to rural areas, may provide an ancillary benefit - unifying citizens from all parts of our nation to overcome an existential threat to humanity.

Pluton is proud of the diversity found within our team. Beginning at the leadership team and extending all the way down to the interns, Pluton is an assortment of different races, ages, religious beliefs, educations, and life experiences. Two of our six founding members are women. At Pluton we understand how diversity works to our benefit. Our scientific team has a remarkable generational diversity with members currently in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. This enables our team to be aware of cutting-edge research methods while maintaining an understanding of valuable lab research techniques no longer being emphasized or even taught. However, age is far from Pluton’s only marker of diversity. Our research associate, Farhan William is a first-generation immigrant from Pakistan and our computational biologist, Dr. Boahemaa Adu-Oppong is from Ghana.  

Pluton is committed to the promotion of diversity from the boardroom to the lab as the company matures.

We are applying to Solve because we believe the network of professionals and the financial resources available through the program will provide us significant benefits in our development and commercialization of our Microbial Cover Crop (MCC) product suite. We feel that these resources could help us to solve the three major challenges addressed in previous sections: funding, regulatory, and customer/stakeholder relationships.  

We feel that the MIT network could be instrumental in helping us to locate and secure funding for our products. While Pluton has an experienced team interacting with investors, additional connections and suggestions on how to improve our attractiveness to investors are always welcome and appreciated. Most importantly, MIT’s presence as a grantor will provide additional “social proof” about the validity of Pluton’s approach to solving environmental challenges via Microbial Cover Crops.

We also feel that the MIT network could help us to streamline our regulatory process, especially if we are able to be connected with individuals who have gone through the USDA process themselves or who are involved with the USDA’s regulatory arms.  

Finally, we hope that MIT’s network can connect us with additional stakeholders in the agricultural industry, potentially leading to additional dialogue with growers and suppliers for growers. We feel that this will be essential as we develop our products to address specific customer pain points as well as during our alpha and beta testing phases.

Support in all of the areas indicated would help Pluton to streamline the technical and commercial development of our suite of Microbial Cover Crops (MCC), and priorities are:

• Business model: We are seeking advice and mentorship regarding how to strategically produce, transport, and distribute our products. 

• Monitoring: While we are currently working out a deal with a potential partner for soil monitoring, the job might be too large for a single partner, especially as we reach 100 million acres. In addition, we could benefit from partnerships with ecosystem and water monitoring specialists.

• Product Distribution: The logistics of production and sale of enough MCC to inoculate 100 million acres by 2026 will be a challenge that we believe the MIT team can help with. For perspective, if we apply 1 lb of product per acre, we need to ship nearly 2,250 loaded semi-truck trailers of product in that year.
• Technology: Pluton continues to construct its Helix microbiome data platform, and access to AI/ML subject matter experts interested in joining the team long-term would be a significant advantage

Our company and products are aimed to address environmental crisis by leveraging naturally occurring microbial solutions. MIT Solve Members consists of several companies with a similar mission. Our mission overlaps particularly with EcoAdvisors, Foundation for Food and Agriculture, and United Nations Environment Programme.

Additionally, our R&D activities rely upon cutting edge sequencing and meticulously designed experiments. We have found partnerships with academics highly productive and would like to cultivate partnerships with MIT faculty.

A key aspect of the entire Microbial Cover Crop (MCC) product suite is the potential to absorb enormous quantities of planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into useful soil organic carbon. In fact, even if our products were applied to only a ninth of the total agricultural land in the US, or 100 million acres, we estimate that we could remove a quarter of the emissions caused by US agriculture (0.17 GT).  

Carbon absorption goes hand-in-hand with decarbonization. Even if the electric grid (25% of US emissions), commercial and industrial usage (13%), and the transportation sector (29%) can be feasibly decarbonized, we are still left with industry and agriculture making up the sum (33%, or 2.16 GT annually). Industries such as cement and steel production are notoriously difficult to decarbonize since the release of CO2 is inherent in their processes. Reaching net zero will require their emissions to be either captured at the source and/or through products like the Pluton MCCs. In addition, many of agriculture’s emissions are inherent in current methods, which allow soil degradation and limit CO2 capture by soils. The MCC product suite can help reverse this trend on the fields themselves.

For these reasons, we feel that our solution is perfectly aligned with the goals of the ServiceNow Prize. If we are awarded the $100,000, we will use the funds to push our carbon capture MCCs through the initial phases of testing in greenhouses, allowing us to approach field testing.

Micromining®, the process upon which we are basing the initial discovery phase of our Microbial Cover Crop (MCC) product suite, uses advanced computing as an integral component. The sample characterization used to base our hypothesis-driven initial selections on is based on advanced whole-microbiome genomic analysis. Further, our analysis of the populations as they progress through our selection and optimization process continues utilizing this advanced process. As we continue to build our Micromining platform, we are using advanced computing to automatically select candidate starting samples for specific microbial functions based on the genes and microbial genera present. We feel that these features qualify us for the AI for Humanity Prize.

If awarded the $200,000,  we will use it to advance development of our Micromining platform and to effectively apply it to the in-season MCC and the phosphate solubilizing MCC products.