The missing measurement
QSAAT was a tool we designed after the 2022 XPRIZE Carbon Removal entry. Count soil life the same way each time. Then ask whether that count can sit next to a carbon number. It did not become a product we sold.
This page is the 2023 measurement work. It is not a carbon credit. It is not a farm we ran. It did not become a product we sold.
What the letters meant
QSAAT stood for Quantitative Ecosystem Sample Assessment Automation Technology. In the room we shortened it to soil: the four groups a microscopist already scores — bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes — counted the same way on every slide, so one lab could be compared to another.
Why it existed
CCS entered XPRIZE Carbon Removal in 2022 with WQ. The WQ — Quest of Quality listing recorded the team as a Qualified Competitor. The competition did not award us a Milestone prize.
On our own tape the following year we named the gap: we could not securely correlate microbiological assessments with quantitative carbon sequestration. QSAAT was the attempt to close that gap. Not a second farm plan. A measurement.
Who we sat with
The method we were automating was the microscopy taught by Soil Food Web School — already named on our 2022 plan page. Their constraint is practical: a slide dries; counts vary between technicians; the school’s core job is a snapshot of biological integrity, not a carbon registry.
We designed QSAAT to serve that snapshot first. Carbon was the later question, not the first slide.
A ledger we asked for
We looked at IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric as a place to keep an audit trail of those results. We had meetings. That did not become a partnership. CCS does not run an IBM product, and we do not operate a coin.
The separate 2022–25 filing on generating value from ecosystem-health measures is EHDC. QSAAT addresses measurement; EHDC is an open value-layer proposal. They are not the same application.
What did not ship
No farmer dashboard. No dollar-per-test we will quote. No claim that the 2023 prototype is the software on this site. The land is still the ledger. Measurement still comes before value — the same sentence we use in 2026, without this acronym.