Overview
Yard Stick is looking for a number of Soil Carbon Field Technicians to help us fight climate change with soil. This role is an essential part of Yard Stick’s primary on-the-ground operations, deploying our novel soil carbon measurement technology as well as traditional soil testing methodology on fields across the US. This is a contracted seasonal/part-time 1099 position. We are a small company with big ambitions, and therefore we need people who are highly entrepreneurial, reliable, comfortable with travel, and committed to working towards solving climate change.
Location flexible, and significant cross-country travel is required. Hourly pay (including pay for time spent travel), and travel expenses will be paid for.
About Yard Stick PBC
Yard Stick is a remote-first, seed-stage company, with founders based in Boston and Oakland. We are on a mission to reverse climate change with agriculture. Scientists and farmers alike know that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric CO2 at gigaton/year scale. When these practices are adopted, more carbon is stored in soils, improving soil health and fighting climate change. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon efforts back - until now.
By reducing the cost of soil carbon measurement by 90%+, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer income, and combat climate change.
Current soil carbon measurement technologies are slow, expensive, and cumbersome, relying on conventional soil cores and labs to quantify carbon stocks. In contrast, Yard Stick is fast and cheap - without sacrificing accuracy. As a testament to our technology’s potential, alongside our scientific collaborators, we were awarded a $3.6M grant from the DOE ARPA-E Smartfarm as well as other highly competitive grant programs which reward technical merit like NSF SBIR. For more background, check out some coverage in TechCrunch or Treehugger.
We've also raised money from top climate VCs, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates' climate fund), Lowercarbon Capital (Chris and Crystal Sacca's climate fund), MCJ Collective, and others. Details of the financing aren’t announced in a press release or article, because that can feel a bit cart before the horse, but we're happy to share more detail about our funding when we chat.
About The Role
This Soil Carbon Tech role is critical to the success and rollout of Yard Stick’s offerings and works in-field across the country and a variety of project types to meet our R+D and client goals. The Yard Stick team and our client base is spread across the country, but our current focus is primarily in the Midwest. We’re growing quickly, and this position will be an essential role with significant responsibility.
You will be primarily responsible for testing our hardware and software in fields across the US to help us evaluate and improve our technology’s accuracy, durability, and usability. You will be leading projects geared towards calibrating our technology, as well as collecting measurements to quantify stocks on client lands using a variety of different methodologies.
You’ll provide feedback on hardware and software tools alike, as Yard Stick has innovative offerings in both domains. Obviously, when stuff breaks, you’ll document why and help us brainstorm ways to improve.
Yard Stick’s offerings combine a large number of disparate disciplines, including highly technical hardware, a web app which manages carbon measurement and GIS data, and ML pipelines which connect the two. This person ultimately will work cross-disciplinarily along with our hardware, software, soil science, and business teams alike to maximize the pace of Yard Stick’s R&D and therefore climate impact, so the ability to communicate clearly to a wide range of people is a must.
We need someone who can handle rigorous field work with efficiency and exceptional precision. The ideal candidate for this role is comfortable traveling, working outdoors, handling a wide array of equipment, and working in a team off 2-6 people through projects that can include rapid schedule changes, long days, and inclement weather.
Currently, Yard Stick is focused on proof of concept of our in situ spectral probe. Generating high-quality, publishable data requires excellent field operations. In parallel, we’re also creating our commercial offerings. This role will be crucial in carrying out both streams of work.
Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Yard Stick’s impact goals go well beyond climate science (although our #1 core value is Climate Impact). Why? Our company operates primarily in the US agricultural sector, which is predicated on centuries of mass land theft and disenfranchisement of Native and Black people. This harm continues today. If we’re going to work in this sector, we need to actively work to make it better.
Regarding hiring and culture, we work to create a work environment where everyone feels confident sharing their ideas, problem-solving happens openly and collaboratively, and mistake-making is welcomed. We also standardize our interview process and questions to reduce “likeability” bias, benchmark salaries against industry databases to reduce negotiation, and utilize tools like the Gender Decoder (this one is feminine-coded, fwiw). Climate change is arguably the most complex challenge ever faced by humanity - we need all of humanity activated to fight back, and that motivates us to build a diverse team. 
