Healthy crops start with healthy soil, which is exactly why startup Living Soils is developing a microbiological product that stimulates and restores soil life. Founder Jelena Koritic participated in the NOM Startup Program and shares her experiences, future plans, and entrepreneurial lessons. 'Validating outside your own network delivers incredibly valuable insights.'
To meet global food demand, we have become increasingly dependent on intensive agriculture and the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. In the short term this leads to higher yields, but in the long run it causes many problems, such as erosion, soil degradation, desertification, and a lack of biodiversity. 'Many agricultural problems are actually soil problems,' says Living Soils founder Jelena Koritic. 'But if the balance is right, everything else follows naturally.'
A complex ecosystem
According to Koritic, the idea behind Living Soils began with a simple observation: 'I grew up in the countryside in Croatia. When I moved to Drenthe, I noticed a stark contrast in how we treat land and nature here. Because of intensive soil cultivation and excessive use of chemicals and fertilizers, the soil here no longer functions properly. As a result, crops become more vulnerable, which in turn makes you increasingly dependent on pesticides and fertilizers.'
To break this vicious cycle, Koritic developed a kind of microbiological extract that can be sprayed onto fields. 'Soil is not a dead substrate from which things grow on their own, but a complex ecosystem of local bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes,' Koritic explains. 'We create an microbiome extract that is specifically tailored to the local soil and enriched with bioactive substances that further stimulate microbial activity. This restores the soil, improves crop growth, and reduces—or even completely eliminates—the need for chemicals.'
Document everything
'But building and creating life simply takes longer than destroying it does, and that sometimes makes it difficult to gain traction with this product,' Koritic continues. 'With pesticides, you see impact very quickly, whereas soil restoration is not immediately visible. It’s incredibly important for us as a company to have convincing evidence that our product works. That’s also why we don’t just work with farmers, but are also starting projects with various research institutes and universities, so our product can be tested extensively.
According to Koritic, taking the step toward scientific collaboration and independent testing was also an important entrepreneurial lesson: 'I’m very practically minded, and in the beginning our product was really the result of trial and error. Five years ago, I decided to rent a small plot of land to test my hypothesis that soil life is the missing link in current agricultural practices. I ran a small scale flower farm where I applied all the restoration techniques available, that allowed me to understand the huge gap in the market - regionally matched wide diversity microbiome.
Once I developed the product, we tested it ourselves in lab scale over a period of one year. Then we upscaled the production technology in order to produce more and started in parallel extensive field tests with farmers. But we never pushed the product through university testing and we heard about that fact over and over, she jokes. 'So my biggest entrepreneurial lesson: get university on board at early stage!
Startup Program
Living Soils participated in the NOM Startup Program last year. 'Initially, we were mainly looking for funding when we were referred to the program,' Koritic says. 'It helped us confirm our idea about the right market, but even more importantly, it helped us validate with potential customers. I conducted many interviews for that, and in the end it was just as important and valuable for us as outsourcing testing.'
'You’re quickly inclined to validate within your own network,' Koritic continues. 'But those people know you or are often already familiar with your product, so in the end you get a biased opinion and not the objective information you really need. On top of that, as an entrepreneur you tend to live very much in your own world. Validating outside our own network therefore delivered incredibly valuable insights, allowing us to confidently and purposefully build toward the next step for our company.'
Pilot projects and scaling up
According to Koritic, that next step consists of upscaling the production and developing 2 new products. 'We’re already working on several projects in Drenthe and North Holland, and this year 12 new projects will be added,' Koritic says. 'some of them are pilots, and many are new clients. There is a huge interest in this kind of a product'
It may sound like painstaking work, but according to Koritic it’s not that bad: 'Once you know how to do this properly, it’s really just a matter of copy-paste. And suddenly it becomes very scalable. We’re still looking for funding for that scaling phase, but if all goes well, we’ll be moving toward 500+ tons of production in the coming years. With that, we’ll help farmers and growers in the Netherlands maintain their production in a sustainable and future-proof way, with fewer chemical inputs and fertilizers.'