Glacier grime to solve farmers’ challenges
A small vial full of grey dust stands on a desk at the Rock Flour Company offices. The company COO, Eliot Booth, insists that this dust can ease not one, not two, but three pains of modern agriculture. If successful, the dust will help conventional farmers reduce harm to climate and the aquatic environment and help organic farmers increase yield. So far, the start-up has raised 50 mio DKK (6,7 mio €) for its R&D efforts. In early 2026 the company moved to a start-up community run by Innovation District Copenhagen-partner Symbion. By Jes Andersen.
Releases nutrients and absorbs CO²
The grey dust is dried mud harvested at the foot of glaciers in Greenland. For millennia the grinding of the ice sheet has pounded bedrock into the finest powder. Now its natural content of Potassium, Phosphorous and 50 other nutrients & elements is available to plants. Thanks to the small particle size the powder also binds nitrogen and readily absorbs up to 25 percent of its weight in CO².
Our rock flour improves soil massively. Because its particles are so small, it also holds water. Theoretically, we could even turn Sahara sand into arable land if we could add enough Greenlandic rock flour to it”: Eliot Booth, COO, The Rock Flour Company.
The benefit of shared lab facilities
In the immediate future the young company needs to carry out a great deal of analysis work, so they moved to Symbion to benefit from the shared-lab facility there. As the powder is completely natural though, most of the R&D challenges faced by Rock Flour company are regulatory and cultural rather than scientific.
Battling tradition
On the cultural side, they need to persuade farmers that this product beats what they spread on fields today. To this end the company is currently conducting field trials on progressively larger patches of land.
We have shown that conventional farmers can reduce fertilizer use without production loss. More importantly, we have shown that organic farmers can increase yield by up to 30 percent and we now expect to hit the market in 2027”: Eliot Booth, COO, The Rock Flour Company.
Keeping nitrogen out of lakes and streams
On the regulatory side of things, the company expects help from a new set of rules reducing the amount of nitrogen a farmer may wash into waterways.
Nitrogen is usually leached into streams and lakes when it rains. Rock flour binds nitrogen. Because its huge surface area binds nutrients as well as water, the rainwater can no longer flush the nitrogen out of it, but plants can still access it as a nutrient”: Eliot Booth, COO, The Rock Flour Company.
Carbon capture for millenia
The company’s business case will improve further, if legislators can be persuaded to build a carbon offset system which rewards carbon capture that keeps the CO² bound for a long time.
Plant a tree and it will bind the carbon for a couple of hundred years at most. When you spread our rock flour on a field, it reacts with dissolved CO² in rainwater to form carbonate rocks. These rocks hold on to the carbon for hundreds of thousands of years. We feel this should give more carbon offsets points than any less permanent solution”: Eliot Booth, COO, The Rock Flour Company.
A mine that does no digging
For The Rock Flour Company, the most immediate regulatory challenge is, that Greenlandic law sees it as a mining company. That means, that they have to provide substantial environmental as well as social impact assessments. With time Booth hopes that the authorities of Greenland will realize that his operation is a lot less invasive.
There will be no blasting at our sites. No chemical treatment. No waste rock or tailing. All we will do is dig up silt in the glacial delta, drain it of water, and cart it away. The ice sheet has produced the rock flour. We just need to move it”: Eliot Booth, COO, The Rock Flour Company.
Based on unique geolocical insights
The Rock Flour company is the brainchild of world-famous Danish/Greenlandic geologist, Minik Rosing. While doing field work for Innovation District Copenhagen-partner University of Copenhagen, he saw first-hand the vast amounts of grey dust washed out from under the ice-shield every year. Just waiting for someone to haul it off and improve fields around the world.