TL;DR
- Between October and December we are in Barcelona, Basel, Valencia and Thessaloniki.
- Those four rooms hold impact investors and founders, biocontrol developers, seed breeders, and soil scientists and policy people. Almost no overlap in attendance.
- Each asks a different question about soil, and none of them is "what is in this sample".
- What connects them is one problem seen from four sides: soil measurement that is comparable, repeatable and good enough to decide on.
The calendar is telling us something
Five years ago a soil laboratory's event list would have been a list of agricultural fairs.
Ours, this autumn, contains an impact investment week in Barcelona, the annual meeting of the biocontrol industry in Basel, the European seed congress in Valencia, and a scientific conference on soil health monitoring in Thessaloniki.
That is not diversification for its own sake. It is what happens when several separate groups arrive at soil from different directions within about two years of each other. Each of them has a question. None of the questions is the same, and none of them is the one a soil lab has traditionally been set up to answer.
Barcelona, 14 to 15 October: where does capital go next?
Norrsken Impact Week, Norrsken House Barcelona.
The room is founders and investors rather than agronomists, which is unusual for us and deliberate. Norrsken has raised over 750 million euros and backed more than 150 startups, and the people in that building are there with mandates.
The economic case for soil is no longer in dispute, and it was largely made by other people. What is missing is not appetite. Financing anything requires a number that holds still: a baseline, a method that did not change between measurements, and provenance strong enough to survive somebody else checking it. Soil data today mostly fails that test.
So the argument we are bringing is that soil is close to being financeable and is not there yet, and that the gap is measurement rather than awareness.
Ask us here about: what a defensible soil baseline requires, and what it costs.
Basel, 20 to 22 October: where do the next actives come from?
ABIM, the 21st Annual Biocontrol Industry Meeting.
This is the most concentrated room of the four. Effectively the entire biological crop protection industry, in one building, for three days.
The pressure here is easy to state. Pathogens develop resistance to the products that work, regulators keep withdrawing established actives, and the pipelines meant to replace them search a narrow slice of the biology that exists. Everyone in that building knows it.
Soil is the obvious reservoir. Microbes have spent billions of years evolving ways to suppress each other, and long-read sequencing has made a great deal of that readable. The constraint has moved from access to aim: once millions of genes are readable, where do you look?
Our answer is to use field evidence to narrow the search. Where a pathogen is present and the disease never developed, something may be suppressing it, and that is a direction rather than an anecdote once you have enough observations.
Ask us here about: using ecological signal to prioritise candidate biology, and what a discovery pilot looks like.
Valencia, 25 to 28 October: how much of my trial data is usable?
Seed companies and breeders run large multi-site trial programmes, and a familiar proportion of every programme produces data nobody can interpret. The genotype performed differently and it is not clear whether that was the genotype, the site, the season or the management.
Soil is a large part of the unexplained variance, and it is the part most often measured after the fact, if at all. Site selection usually happens on logistics and history rather than on soil condition, which means the trial design has a hole in it before anything is planted.
The question in this room is not what is in the soil. It is which sites should have been chosen, and what has to be measured up front so that the results are attributable afterwards.
Ask us here about: characterising trial sites before layout, and building a soil covariate into trial interpretation.
Thessaloniki, 7 to 10 December: how do we all measure it the same way?
Soil Health Now, at the Aristotle University research dissemination centre, hosted alongside the AI4SoilHealth final event.
This is the scientific and policy room, and it is the one with a deadline behind it. The EU Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive has been in force since December 2025, and member states have until the end of 2028 to transpose it. Monitoring obligations are coming, across agricultural, forest and urban soils.
A monitoring obligation behaves differently from a testing obligation. It means the same place, measured the same way, compared across years and across regions. The weight falls on protocol consistency, sample provenance and benchmark quality, rather than on any single clever measurement.
Which is why the programme here runs through soil health indicators, in-situ measurement, eDNA, Earth observation and pan-European assessment. It is a room full of people trying to make measurements agree with each other.
Ask us here about: protocol consistency, benchmark construction, and what makes a soil biology result comparable between sites.
The same problem, seen from four sides
Put those four questions next to each other and they collapse into one.
None of them is asking for a number on a page. All of them are asking for measurement that is consistent enough to be compared, and provenance strong enough that the comparison holds when somebody checks it.
That is a less exciting product than it sounds, and it is the thing that decides whether any of the four conversations goes anywhere.
Practical details
If you are going to any of these, tell us before you get there. Half an hour booked in advance is worth more than a chance meeting in a corridor, and the corridors at ABIM are not built for it.
Sources
- Norrsken Impact Week. https://www.norrsken.org/impactweek
- ABIM, Annual Biocontrol Industry Meeting. https://www.abim.ch/
- Euroseeds Congress. https://euroseedscongress.com/
- Soil Health Now 2026. https://2026.soilhealthnow.events
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