Recap 2025: A Year of Soil, Space, and Unexpected Allies
In 2025, betterSoil moved between policy rooms, global stages, and real-world projects, always with one question: how do we make soil fertility measurable, investable, and scalable? Here’s our year in people, places, and progress, ending with a moment we won’t forget.
A highlight we didn’t see coming: meeting Natalie Portman
Some moments capture the shift in public attention better than any KPI. At ChangeNOW, we had the opportunity to meet Natalie Portman, and what made it special wasn’t the celebrity, it was the curiosity. The conversation started with biochar and quickly became a story about carbon, water resilience, and practical soil regeneration. That visit was a symbolic snapshot of something bigger: soil health is entering mainstream climate culture.
From global stages to grounded conversations
We spent the year where big narratives meet real implementation:
- ChangeNOW 2025 (Paris): a reminder that climate resilience will be won (or lost) in our food systems. We were on site with our work at the intersection of regenerative practice and scalable innovation.
- Greentech Festival 2025 (Berlin): where the signal was clear: regenerative agriculture is increasingly seen as investable and scalable, especially when paired with data-driven tools like our Farm Assistant.
- EU Parliament dialogue on digitalisation in agriculture: an important checkpoint: innovation must be inclusive, and governance must keep up with what technology can already do.
Across these stages, our message stayed consistent: soil regeneration is not “soft sustainability.” It is risk management, supply-chain resilience, and measurable impact.
When technology became tangible: a milestone for our digital product
After months of planning, drafting, and recalculating, 2025 marked a major step for our digital journey. We officially signed a partnership with Tensor AI Solutions GmbH to develop the backend of our WebApp. Supported by the European Space Agency and ESA BIC Baden Württemberg, our digital product combines satellite data, weather patterns, and soil insights to support better decisions on crop rotation and soil regeneration. Finding the right partner was not easy. What mattered most was alignment in purpose. This milestone represents more than a technical step forward. It reflects a shared commitment to innovation, healthy soils, and regenerative agriculture.
From Europe to East Africa: insight becomes practice
In Nairobi, during a visit with our global funding partner GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation, we experienced how clearly business logic and farming reality can intersect. One day was spent with local entrepreneurs and engineers, working through numbers, assumptions, and scaling pathways. The next day, we stood on red and dark soils with potato farmers who use soil testing results to plan rotations between potatoes and maize. The visit made one thing clear. Better soil begins with insight, but it thrives because farmers turn that insight into action.
Local action with global relevance: Laichingen
While working internationally, 2025 also deepened our local engagement. Together with the Bürgerstiftung Laichinger Alb, we launched and advanced a civic process focused on soil health, climate action, and wellbeing.
Through roundtables, visioning exercises, and concrete planning sessions, several priority areas emerged:
• More green spaces to improve microclimate and biodiversity
• Soil friendly composting with local farmers
• Citizen engagement to transform sealed or degraded green areas
• Circular economy ideas linking food, land, and community
Laichingen became a living example of how soil regeneration can be embedded into everyday life. Media coverage confirmed that these local stories resonate far beyond the region.
Soil policy on a European scale: Mission Soil Week
At Mission Soil Week in Denmark, the political and economic relevance of soil health became unmistakable. Discussions with representatives of the European Commission highlighted key realities:
• Over seventy percent of European companies depend on ecosystems including soils
• Around sixty percent of European soils are in poor condition
• Chemical residues are present in the majority of agricultural soils
The EU Soil Mission emerged as a crucial framework to address these challenges at scale, with a clear ambition: healthy soils by 2050.
Where “space” became practical: from orbit to farm decisions
In 2025, we continued to strengthen the bridge between earth observation and on-the-ground agronomy:
- Our collaboration with the Green Space Center reinforces our direction: combining soil science, climate-smart farming, and satellite intelligence to support data-driven regenerative decisions.
- We also brought this work to the broader Earth observation ecosystem through the Living Planet Symposium 2025, focusing on translating satellite signals into actionable farm recommendations.
This is one of our core beliefs: data only matters when it changes decisions, on farms, in procurement, and in sustainability strategy.
People and projects: where soil becomes action
Some of the most meaningful work this year happened far away from stages:
- Bucharest (Climate Change Summit 2025), where we made the business case for soil health in front of a large international audience, connecting soil regeneration to climate risk, agrifood resilience, and ESG value creation.
- Senegal (SCEFAB Founders Lab, Saint-Louis), coaching 30 young entrepreneurs from Germany, Ethiopia, and Senegal to develop circular business ideas rooted in soil health and local urgency.
Machines, space, and biodiversity
At Agritechnica in Hanover, conversations with machinery manufacturers showed how soil compaction, structure, and efficiency are becoming central engineering questions. AI, connected systems, and satellite integration are no longer future visions but active development areas.
This perspective continued at the Impact Festival and Space Tech Expo Europe. Space technology allows ecosystems to be observed, but betterSoil works downstream, translating satellite data into actionable agronomic insights. Soil may be monitored from space, but its story is written in the field.
Dialogue, visibility, and soil literacy
Throughout December, our Advent Calendar connected soil health with everyday decisions and value chains, from food and fashion to cosmetics and culture. It reinforced a core message: soil health is not a niche topic. At platforms such as the EUSPA User Consultation Platform in Prague, exchanges around Copernicus and European space programs further strengthened our conviction that open satellite data can become a powerful lever for regeneration when combined with agronomic knowledge.
What we learned in 2025
Looking back, several lessons stand out:
- Soil is becoming a board-level topic, because climate risk is becoming balance-sheet risk.
- Regeneration scales faster when it’s measurable, and measurement increasingly comes from the smart combination of satellite data + agronomic logic.
- The strongest partnerships are unexpected, from policy spaces to brands, researchers, and innovators who want to operationalize soil health.
2025 gave us a clearer picture of what betterSoil is here to do: connect science, technology, and implementation so that soil regeneration becomes the default, not the exception.
If you met us this year, on a stage, at a workshop, in a policy dialogue, or in a corridor conversation, thank you. And if you didn’t: 2026 is coming.