CEO Azadeh Farajpour with BioCircular Loop Podcast!
From Roots to Resilience: CEO Azadeh Farajpour shares her soil-driven journey, tackling degradation, boosting food security, and scaling betterSoil’s impact across Europe, Africa, and beyond.
With Biocircular Loop Podcast:
CEO of betterSoil, Azadeh Farajpour, was invited to the bioCircular Loop Podcast in August 2025, to discuss about the significance of soil, Azadeh’s personal story with soil, and the company betterSoil. During this time, Azadeh has discussed the importance of soil, the current problems associated with soil, and how better soil can be found to address these issues prevailing in the agricultural sector in the EU, and has further expanded to Iran, Kenya, and Malawi. While, the importance of soil has been largely discussed throughout our blogs, the podcast has provided an opportunity to discuss the personal narrative of betterSoil’s CEO behind the founding of the company.
Role of Soil
Soil is a finite resource. Soil health is crucial to achieving sustainable development goals, specifically, they ensure biodiversity, clean water, and climate change mitigation. Soil health is crucial to ensure the food security for a growing population across the globe. CEO Azadeh Farajpour discusses the importance of soils in
- Maintaining the soil microbiome
- Water storage
- Carbon storage and
- Ensuring food security
Soil is one of the fundamental finite resources required to sustain the global population with food and has a significant role in ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling and water cycling.
Personal roots in Soil Health!
Azadeh Farajpour has further shared her personal story linked to soil health. How her own personal journey has shaped her path towards betterSoil, and aiding the drive towards sustainable soil management in the agricultural sector. She has shared
“Growing up in Iran, with family roots in agriculture, I have observed the impacts of climate change and the resultant loss of agriculture yields due to loss of soil health.”
Since then, Azadeh had been committed to discovering the science behind loss of soil health and aiming towards solutions to eliminate soil degradation as soil degradation negatively impacts both farmers and consumers.
Soil Degradation!
Soil degradation is the deterioration of soil in terms of soil health, which is the loss of carbon content, water holding capacity, along with soil microbes and soil nutrients. Around 30% of the soils in the EU are currently degraded, and it has been noted that the rate at which soils are degraded is 100 times higher than the rate at which soil is regenerated. Soil health, in Azadeh’s words, is when
“Soil is really soft when it's healthy. It contains a lot of water, and that's why it becomes soft. And if you hold it in your hand and you can make it a fist and then you open your fist, it should stay in the round form. It shouldn't really break. This is a healthy soil.”
However, a majority of soils do not exhibit this and are prone to soil erosion under the current environmental regime. Soil degradation is an issue to be focused on.
Agri Supply Chain Stakeholders!
Founder Azadeh Farajpour has mentioned the importance of involving all the stakeholders in the agricultural supply chain, from farmers to agri businesses. Additionally, education is crucial to enable the understanding of soil health for farmers, students, and businesses. This was fundamentally, from the thought that,
“The negative outcomes of declining soil health are significantly evident in agri-businesses due to loss in yields and also the reduced quality of the yields, such as potatoes. betterSoil provides services to both agri-businesses and farmers.”
Overall, the integration of partnerships with different stakeholders, such as farmers, agri-businesses, farm owners, governmental organisations, and educational organisations for ensuring healthy soils is a significant step under betterSoil.
betterSoil Services!
betterSoil’s service for agribusinesses includes consultancy services on improving soil health. The consultancy services are aimed at
- Sustainable cultivation strategies
- Integration of practices across different stakeholders
- Evaluation of ecological impact
- Action Plan suited to the agricultural system
Additionally, betterSoil is working on delivering an application programme, which is betterSoil’s Farm Assistant for farmers, and plans on introducing digital services on carbon sequestration for agricultural farms.
Thank you, Biocircular Loop!
betterSoil’s journey in soil health has been briefly shared with the world through biocircular Loop Pdocast. This has given the opportunity to further introduce the concept of soil health to a wider audience and the importance of soil health. Subscribe to our newsletter and stay in touch for more updates!