Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Wed, 26 Au. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/canadas-next-industrial-play-what

TL;DR

  • Miniseries opener framing carbon removal as a layer on Canada’s $1T industrial buildout ahead of Carney’s September investment summit — useful political framing.
  • Jim Mann (UNDO) claims enhanced rock weathering on farmland accelerates natural weathering “50 to 100,000 times” — the upper bound feels rhetorical, but the mechanism is standard.
  • UNDO’s model: give crushed silicate to farmers free, cover transport and spreading, keep all carbon revenue. Farmer-adoption pragmatism, not revenue-sharing idealism.
  • Mann’s claim: Canada’s 100–300 Mt/yr residual removal need “could all be done with enhanced rock weathering.” Overstated, but the feedstock-plus-farmland argument is real.
  • CFA’s Brody Berrigan on why adoption stalls: farmers are business owners first, extension services have been gutted since the ’90s, neighbor-to-neighbor is the real diffusion channel.

Na’im Merchant kicks off a Carbon Curve miniseries on embedding durable carbon dioxide removal into Canadian industrial projects, timed to Prime Minister Carney’s September 14-15 investment summit. Episode here. Episode one pairs UNDO founder Jim Mann on enhanced rock weathering economics with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture’s Brody Berrigan on what it actually takes to get Prairie farmers to say yes.

The substantive part is the business model, not the chemistry. UNDO is not sharing credit revenue with farmers — Mann is explicit that they hand over the crushed silicate for free, subsidize transport, and cover spreading via contractors using existing lime spreaders. The pitch to the farmer is pH buffering, calcium/magnesium/phosphate/potassium replenishment, and early (still thin) signals on nitrous oxide and methane reductions plus NDVI-tracked plant health. Carbon is UNDO’s problem; agronomy is the farmer’s incentive. Mann is candid that the business is negative cash flow — rock goes down, credits arrive up to two years later — which is why Farm Credit Canada’s late-2025 equity check matters more than a typical strategic: it’s an ag lender underwriting a CDR working capital problem, not a climate fund.

The scale claim deserves scrutiny. Mann argues Canada’s ~150M acres of farmland could absorb the country’s entire 100–300 Mt/yr residual removal need through enhanced rock weathering alone, with room to export. Even granting generous per-hectare weathering rates, that requires basalt or wollastonite logistics across Prairie distances that have not been proven at cost, and MRV (measurement, reporting and verification) in cold, short-season soils remains the open scientific question. Mann points to UNDO’s recently published pore-water sampling technique and their “below 20 cm depth” near-field permanence threshold — meaningful methodological progress, but the durability accounting still leans on conservative buffers rather than direct bicarbonate flux measurement to ocean. Berrigan’s contribution is the sober counterweight: without restored agricultural extension services, adoption will be neighbor-to-neighbor and slow, regardless of how good the Microsoft, Barclays, and British Airways offtakes look.

For adjacent context: UNDO (un-do.com) sits alongside Lithos, Eion, and Mati in the enhanced weathering cohort that Frontier and Microsoft have been anchoring. The Canadian angle here is genuinely differentiated — pairing extraction-sector mineral byproducts with Prairie agriculture and rail infrastructure is a supply chain story other geographies can’t easily copy. Carbon Removal Canada, where Merchant works, has been making the “integrate CDR into existing industry” case for a while, and this episode is essentially that thesis with two operators in the room.

Worth an hour if you’re tracking enhanced weathering unit economics, Canadian CDR policy, or how to structure farmer-facing