Root Global

Core Features

Root is methodology-agnostic: it does not impose a proprietary emissions-calculation methodology. Instead, customers can use established methodologies integrated into the platform, depending on their requirements. Its key capabilities include:

• Farm Data Collection: Collects activity data from hundreds or thousands of farms using assessments adapted to farm type and region. Farmers can enter information themselves or work with procurement teams and farm technicians.

• Data Quality Controls: Applies automated plausibility and validation checks based on real farm data, flags assessments requiring review and provides a dedicated assessment review centre. This is intended to make primary data sufficiently robust for corporate reporting and reduction programmes.

• Farm-Level Reduction Plans: Turns individual farm results into tailored action plans. Farmers and technicians can assess possible measures, while processors can aggregate plans across suppliers and identify programmes with the greatest potential impact and ROI.

• Corporate Carbon Footprints: Calculates Scope 1–3 emissions and connects corporate results with granular agricultural supply-chain data. Users can analyse hotspots, establish climate KPIs and track year-on-year changes across locations, materials and scopes.

• Product Carbon Footprints: Calculates GHG Protocol-compliant PCFs across product categories, incorporating validated farm-level emission factors where available. Root provides both customer-facing summary reports and more detailed internal reports.

• Decarbonization Roadmaps: Brings farm action plans together into a wider value-chain roadmap, enabling processors to set KPIs, compare potential measures and communicate progress to farmers, management teams and downstream customers.

Closing Insights

Founded in 2022 by Eric Oancea and Maurice Hensl, Root Global was created specifically around agricultural Scope 3 emissions, with a focus on enabling validated farm-level data collection at scale. Notable deployments include Goldsteig, where Root is used to collect data annually from around 1,500 dairy farms across Germany and the Czech Republic, and Bel, which uses Root with the Cool Farm Tool across dairy suppliers in Portugal, Poland and Slovakia.

Root raised €8 million in 2024 to expand its work on agricultural supply-chain decarbonization. More recently, the platform has broadened beyond dairy into crops and meat, and Root's results gained recognition from Germany's agricultural development bank Rentenbank in 2025: eligible farmers can use its emissions report when applying for the bank's Zinsbonus Klimabilanz, an interest-rate reduction of up to 0.25 percentage points.

Data is hosted on EU-based servers, with the platform itself ISO 27001 certified. For processors with substantial agricultural Scope 3 emissions, Root's value lies less in producing another corporate footprint than in connecting that footprint to the individual farms where much of the opportunity for reduction actually resides.