Case Study — 06

OneSeed

A six-inch layer of topsoil, mapped hectare by hectare.

Category
Regenerative agriculture intelligence
Audience
Growers, agronomists, and transition financiers
Overview

Soil is an asset class nobody can read

OneSeed is a global regenerative agriculture terminal. It turns two billion hectares of degraded farmland into a browsable atlas of soil profiles, crop prescriptions, and costed transition plans.

The product opens on a rotating globe rather than a form. Fifteen of the world's most consequential agricultural regions sit on it as live markers, from the Midwest Corn Belt and California's Central Valley to the Sahel, the Loess Plateau, the Mekong Delta, and Ukraine's Chernozem Belt. Selecting one opens a dossier for that specific landscape.

Each dossier reads like a working agronomy brief instead of a marketing page. It states the soil order and the single limiting factor holding the region back — sandy Entisols with lateritic hardpan crusting in the Sahel, volcanic Andisols capped by overgrazing in the Rift Valley — then prescribes a mechanical and biological transition plan, a set of cash crops chosen for economic yield, and a set of cover crops chosen purely for soil repair.

The last third of the panel is the part that usually stops a transition dead: money. A target-scale slider takes the operator from a single field to a regional program in hectares, and the estimated capital expenditure recalculates against it. Where the built-in prescription is not enough, a generative agronomy deep dive expands the brief into a full expert write-up for that region and scale.

The Problem

Why regenerative transition stalls

01

Industrial farming broke the carbon sponge

Decades of monoculture, deep tillage, and chemical dependency stripped the organic matter out of the soil. When soil dies its ability to hold water vanishes, which accelerates drought, causes catastrophic runoff, and releases billions of tons of sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere.

02

Agronomy advice is generic, soil is not

A cover crop that repairs a Saskatchewan prairie is worthless on a lateritic Sahelian hardpan. Prescriptions that ignore soil order and the actual limiting factor are the reason so many transitions fail in their first season.

03

Nobody prices the transition honestly

Growers are asked to change everything about their operation without a per-hectare number they can take to a lender. Capital and knowledge transfer, not willingness, are what historically kept the transition slow.

04

The scale of the problem is unreadable

Two billion degraded hectares is a statistic, not a plan. Without a way to see which regions are degrading, why, and what a fix would cost, the number produces alarm instead of allocation.

The Approach

How we built it

01

Start at the globe, not the form

The landing surface is an interactive 3D Earth with live regional markers and two standing counters: two billion hectares degraded, fourteen and a half million regenerated. The scale of the problem and the scale of the response are visible before a single click.

02

One dossier per landscape

Fifteen regions each carry their own soil order, limiting factor, transition category, and a quote from someone farming it. The categories are specific — Water-Smart Orchards, Integrated Silvopasture, Regenerative Aquaculture, Deep-Soil Restoration — because a single 'regenerative' label would have flattened the differences that matter.

03

Split the crop list in two

Cash crops and cover crops are prescribed separately and labelled by what they are for: economic yield versus soil repair. A grower can see exactly which part of the plan pays the bills and which part rebuilds the biome.

04

Make cost move with scale

A hectare slider drives a live capital expenditure readout, so the same dossier answers both what forty hectares would cost a grower and what a regional program would cost a ministry, without switching tools.

05

Generative depth on demand

The static brief covers the common case. An expert agronomy deep dive generates the long-form analysis for operators who need rotation detail, equipment sequencing, and phasing beyond the summary.

06

Show the two trajectories

A scrubbable timeline runs from 1990 to today, contrasting conventional conservation against regenerative acceleration and tracking hectares restored, the two-million-hectare annual pace, and the roughly $250 cost per hectare against a one-billion-hectare goal.

What It Does

Capabilities

Interactive regeneration globe

A rotating 3D Earth carrying fifteen live regional markers, with running counters for globally degraded and already-regenerated hectares.

Ecosystem and soil profiles

Names the soil order and the single limiting factor per region — hardpan crusting, capping, salinity, aquifer depletion — rather than a generic condition score.

Mechanical and biological transition plans

Pairs the equipment and tillage changes with the living-system changes required to move a region off its industrial baseline.

Prescribed cash crops

Region-matched economic yield crops, from heritage salt-tolerant rice in the Mekong to malting barley on the Northern European Plain.

Prescribed cover crops

Repair-first species selected purely for soil function — hairy vetch, forage radish, Desmodium, Napier grass, native perennials, phacelia.

Target scale and CapEx modelling

A hectare slider driving a live estimated capital expenditure per hectare, so a plan can be priced at field, farm, or ministry scale.

Expert agronomy deep dive

Generative long-form analysis that expands any regional dossier into a full agronomic write-up for the selected scale.

Race to Regenerate timeline

A scrubbable 1990-to-present view comparing the conventional conservation trajectory against regenerative acceleration toward one billion hectares.

Fifteen mapped agricultural regions

Corn Belt, Central Valley, Cerrado, Sahel, Punjab, Andalusia, Murray-Darling, Saskatchewan, Pampas, Sumatra, Mekong, Loess Plateau, Rift Valley, Northern European Plain, and the Chernozem Belt.

Design System

The visual language

OneSeed is styled as an instrument, not a campaign. A near-black field lets the illuminated globe carry the whole page, a single emerald signals living soil against it, and every figure is set in monospace so hectares and dollars line up column to column.

01

Colors

  • Living Emerald

    #10B981

    Sole accent — active markers, counters, primary actions

  • Regenerative Teal

    #04231C

    Atmospheric field behind the globe

  • Terminal Void

    #020617

    Base canvas and dossier backdrop

  • Panel Slate

    #0B1120

    Translucent dossier and readout surfaces

  • Data Slate

    #94A3B8

    Labels, metadata, and secondary readouts

  • Divider Slate

    #334155

    Panel borders and column rules

  • Signal White

    #FFFFFF

    Headline figures and primary body copy

  • Paper Slate

    #F8FAFC

    Long-form editorial passages on light sections

02

Typography

Interface

Segoe UI / system grotesque

A neutral system stack chosen so the interface reads as instrumentation rather than as a brand.

Editorial

Times New Roman

Sets the topsoil epigraph and the long-form soil argument, giving the essay sections a printed weight the terminal panels deliberately lack.

Data

Monospace

Hectare counts, CapEx per hectare, pace of restoration, and timeline years, so figures stay aligned as they tick.

03

Principles

  • 01

    The globe is the navigation

    No menu, no region dropdown. Land is selected on the land, which keeps the geography of the problem in view the whole time.

  • 02

    Name the limiting factor

    Every region states the one thing actually holding it back. A profile that lists ten conditions produces no decision; a profile that names the constraint does.

  • 03

    Yield and repair are labelled apart

    Cash crops and cover crops never share a list. Separating what earns from what heals is what makes the plan legible to a lender and to an agronomist at the same time.

  • 04

    Every prescription carries a price

    No recommendation appears without a per-hectare cost attached to it, because an unpriced transition plan is advice rather than a proposal.

FAQ

Questions

OneSeed is a global regenerative agriculture terminal. It maps degraded farmland region by region and pairs each one with a soil profile, a mechanical and biological transition plan, cash and cover crop prescriptions, and an estimated capital cost per hectare.

Fifteen agricultural regions, including the Midwest Corn Belt, California's Central Valley, Brazil's Cerrado, the Sahel, Punjab, Andalusia, the Murray-Darling Basin, the Saskatchewan Prairies, the Pampas, Sumatra, the Mekong Delta, the Loess Plateau, Kenya's Rift Valley, the Northern European Plain, and Ukraine's Chernozem Belt.

Each region carries an estimated capital expenditure per hectare for its transition plan. A target-scale slider sets the number of hectares and the estimate recalculates against it, so the same dossier prices a single field or a regional program.

They do different jobs. Cash crops are prescribed for economic yield so the operation stays solvent through the transition; cover crops are prescribed for soil repair. Keeping the two lists apart makes the economics and the agronomy separately reviewable.

It generates a long-form expert analysis for the selected region and target scale, going past the summary dossier into the detail an operator needs to actually sequence a transition.

Roughly two billion hectares of land are degraded globally. OneSeed tracks more than fourteen and a half million hectares already regenerated against a one-billion-hectare goal, at a pace near two million hectares a year and a cost around $250 per hectare.

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