Soil carbon is the largest research field in carbon removal, and the one with the least industry behind it. The CDR Researcher Census counts 41,118 researchers whose primary pathway is soil carbon - nearly double the next-largest pathway, biochar, and ten times the size of direct air capture. Yet only 1.7% of them work in the corporate sector, the lowest share of any pathway. Most researchers, least commercialization. That is the paradox.
The chart makes the inversion plain. Direct air capture has a tenth of soil carbon’s researchers but four times its corporate share (6.9%). As the research fields get bigger, the fraction of researchers sitting in companies gets smaller, not larger. The biggest science has the fewest businesses built on it.
Why the science is so big
Soil carbon sits directly against mainstream agronomy and soil science. A researcher measuring how cover crops or tillage change soil organic carbon is doing soil science that happens to touch carbon storage - they are not necessarily a carbon-removal specialist. That adjacency is why the field is enormous, and it is a scope point worth stating: the census counts papers that frame their work in a carbon-removal context and match its discovery terms, and “soil carbon sequestration” fans wider than the strictly CDR-framed literature. Benchmarked against Lück and colleagues' 2025 map of global CDR research in Nature Communications, whose soil category is CDR-gated more tightly, the census counts several times more - a deliberate scope choice, not a miscount. The broader soil-science literature is larger still. Yakov Kuzyakov in Göttingen and Axel Don at the Thünen Institute anchor the measurement side of this work.
Why the industry is so small
Soil carbon is genuinely hard to sell as durable removal. The carbon is biological and reversible - a change in tillage or a drought can release it again - and measuring a small change in a large, variable soil stock is one of the hardest monitoring problems in the field. That is why 41,118 researchers have produced only a handful of durable-CDR companies, and why the corporate share sits at 1.7%. The churn compounds it: 31.1% of soil carbon researchers are on an exiting trajectory, the second-highest of any pathway. A large, loosely-attached research base flows in and out around a small commercial core.
The gap between 41,118 researchers and a near-empty company column is the widest in carbon removal, and it can be read two ways. Either soil carbon is permanently hard to commercialise as durable CDR - in which case the science will keep serving agronomy more than removal - or it is the largest untapped reservoir of expertise in the field, waiting on an MRV breakthrough that makes the removal bankable. The census cannot say which. It can say the reservoir is there, and it is the biggest one in carbon removal.
Figures come from the July 2026 CDR Researcher Census: researchers by primary pathway, sector, and trajectory, queried from the census database. Data at captaindrawdown.com/cdr-researcher-census.