Forget, for a moment, every conference room you have ever sat in. Forget the Bloomberg terminal, the pitch deck, the waterfall model in the spreadsheet. We are going to a different kind of room.

It is early morning in late October — frost still on the grass outside, breath visible in the air. The building is a working agricultural hall: concrete floors, steel roof joists, the faint persistent smell of earth and hay that no amount of cleaning ever fully removes. Rows of folding chairs face a low platform at the front. The crowd is perhaps sixty people: some in barn jackets and muddy boots, some in Carhartt and fleece, a few in the kind of quietly expensive technical clothing that marks the serious urban farmer. A handful look distinctly out of place — cleaner shoes, notebooks out, eyes moving carefully around the room.

These are the people who received the invitation that read: First Annual Soil Inoculum Auction — Living Compost, Graded by Biological Profile. They are here because someone in their network told them this was worth seeing. They are not entirely sure why, but they came.

At the front of the hall, arranged on low wooden pallets, are twelve lots. Each is a Johnson-Su bioreactor — a cylindrical structure roughly four feet in diameter and five feet tall, built from wire mesh and packed eighteen months ago with a precise layering of woodchip, straw, crop residues, and inoculant feedstocks. The bioreactors have spent that time outdoors in all weather, never turned, never aerated by machine, never heated. They have been tended by nothing except the organisms they contain. They are, by appearance, unremarkable: dark brown columns of decomposed organic matter, smelling of forest floor after rain.

But appearance is not what is being sold today.

1. The Prospectus

Attached to each lot is a card. On the card is a QR code. Behind the QR code is what the auctioneer calls the prospectus, though the word he uses without irony is the word farmers have used for centuries for an animal’s sale record: the papers.

The papers for Lot 7 read as follows:

Fungal Biomass: 318 μg/g. Fungal-to-Bacterial Ratio: 2.4:1. Active Bacteria: 190 μg/g. Protozoan Count: 78,260/g. Nematode Guild: Bacterial-feeders (dominant), Fungal-feeders (present), Predatory (trace). Mycorrhizal Inoculant: Confirmed colonisation in host root assay. Trace Minerals: Calcium, magnesium, silica, iron — all above detection threshold. Pathogen Screen: Non-detect (E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria). Moisture: 47%. Feedstock: woodchip (oak/maple), cereal straw, fungal-inoculated hardwood, dried kelp, bokashi pre-ferment. Origin: Eighteen-month static pile, no mechanical intervention post-construction. Lab: A&L Laboratories, London, Ontario. Date: October 2, 2028.

The person with the clean shoes and the notebook reads this card three times. Then they look up at the bioreactor — this column of composted matter sitting on a wooden pallet in an agricultural hall in rural Ontario — and they begin, for the first time, to see it differently.

What they are looking at is not four cubic yards of decomposed organic material. What they are looking at is a population. A city. An economy. Seventy-eight thousand protozoa per gram of material, each one a predator hunting bacteria, each act of predation releasing a pulse of plant-available nitrogen into the medium. A fungal-to-bacterial ratio of 2.4:1, indicating a community dominated by the slow-growing, carbon-sequestering, phosphorus-solubilizing hyphal networks that are the signature of mature forest soils and the hardest biological structure in agriculture to rebuild once lost. Confirmed mycorrhizal colonisation — meaning that when this material contacts the rhizosphere of a living plant root, the fungal threads will bridge the gap, extending the plant’s effective root system by orders of magnitude, trading carbon for mineral access in the negotiation that has been the foundation of terrestrial plant life for four hundred million years.

The notebook person writes one word, underlines it twice, and circles it.

Potential.

2. The Bidding Opens

The auctioneer is not theatrical about it. He is a working farmer who has run livestock auctions for twenty years and agreed to run this one because a colleague asked him to and the concept seemed interesting. He has read the prospectuses. He has opinions.

He starts with Lot 1. The papers on Lot 1 are solid but unspectacular: F:B ratio of 0.9:1, protozoan count of 12,400/g, no confirmed mycorrhizal colonisation. Good hot compost. Lots of bacteria. The kind of material that will give a vegetable garden a nitrogen kick and improve soil structure over time. Standard material, well-executed. He opens at forty dollars per cubic yard.

The bidding is quick. A market gardener from Guelph takes it at fifty-five. She needs bacterial-dominant material for her brassica beds. She knows what she’s buying. The room notes the price.

Lots 2 through 5 move similarly. The F:B ratios cluster between 0.7 and 1.3. The protozoan counts are in the 15,000–35,000 range. Prices settle between forty-five and seventy dollars per cubic yard. The room develops a feel for the baseline. The notebook person is writing numbers.

Then Lot 6. F:B ratio: 1.8:1. Protozoan count: 52,000/g. Fungal-feeders present in the nematode guild — a marker that the fungal network is mature enough to support a secondary trophic level of organisms that eat it. The auctioneer opens at sixty.

The room wakes up. A bid comes from the back at seventy. A counter from the left at eighty-five. A pause. The back comes back at ninety-five. The left holds at one hundred. The back folds. Lot 6 goes at one hundred dollars per cubic yard — nearly double the Lot 1 price — to a regenerative orchard operation from the Niagara Peninsula that has been rebuilding its soil biology for three years and knows precisely what a mature fungal network costs to establish from scratch and how long it takes.

The room is doing arithmetic.

3. Lot 7

Lot 7 is the one with the papers the notebook person read three times.

The auctioneer lets the room sit with the numbers for a moment before he opens. He does not editorialize. He reads the key figures aloud: F:B ratio 2.4:1. Protozoan count 78,260 per gram. Confirmed mycorrhizal colonisation. He says: “This is an eighteen-month pile. Static. One intervention — a moisture check at month nine. That’s it.”

He opens at ninety dollars.

The first bid comes before he finishes the sentence: one hundred and ten. A counter: one hundred and thirty. Another: one hundred and fifty. The orchard operation from Lot 6 re-enters at one hundred and seventy. A new voice — someone who has not bid yet, sitting near the back, who runs a market garden operation supplying three hospital cafeterias and has spent six months trying to understand why her yields are stable but her soil is, in her words, “tired” — comes in at one hundred and ninety.

The room has gone quiet in the way that rooms go quiet when they understand that something is happening.

The orchard operation counters at two hundred and ten. The market gardener sits with it for a long moment — she is calculating, literally, on the back of the card in her hand: four cubic yards at two hundred and ten dollars, applied at a rate of one ton per acre across the three acres she is trying to rebuild, against the cost of three more seasons of underperformance, against the cost of synthetic inputs she has been trying to phase out, against the value of a mycorrhizal network she does not currently have and cannot buy from a catalogue — and she bids two hundred and thirty.

The orchard operation does not counter.

Lot 7 sells at two hundred and thirty dollars per cubic yard. It is four times the opening price of Lot 1.

The room has just watched a market discover a price. Not for compost. For vivance.¹

4. What the Price Signal Carries

In a conventional commodity compost market, Lot 1 and Lot 7 are the same product. They are both dark brown organic matter. They both improve soil structure. They are both sold by volume. The chemistry is different, but chemistry is not what the commodity market prices: it prices weight, volume, and convenience. Under commodity logic, Lot 7 might command a modest premium for its nitrogen content or its low pathogen count. It would not command four times the price.

But the bidders in this room were not buying chemistry. They were buying what the chemistry represents: a living community at a specific stage of ecological complexity, with a measurable generative capacity, capable of producing compounding biological returns when introduced into a receptive soil system. They were bidding on a F:B ratio of 2.4:1 because they know — from research, from experience, from watching their own soils respond to previous inoculations — that fungal-dominant compost applied to a transitioning soil can compress a decade of natural fungal succession into two or three seasons. They were bidding on 78,260 protozoa per gram because each one is a living nitrogen-cycling engine that will continue operating, reproducing, and recruiting new generations long after the compost itself has been incorporated. They were bidding, in the language of this framework, on Vβ — the leverage ratio of biological input. They were paying a premium for the certainty that this inoculant, on a soil with structural capacity to receive it, will produce outsized generative response.

The price signal that emerges from the auction — $55/cubic yard for F:B 0.9, $100 for F:B 1.8, $230 for F:B 2.4 with confirmed mycorrhizal colonisation — is the first functioning price discovery mechanism for biological complexity at the unit of production. It is not a model, not an index, not an academic valuation exercise. It is a bid and an ask and a clearing price, arrived at by people with real stakes making real decisions about real soil.

This is what vivance looks like when a market first learns to see it. The auctioneer did not know he was running a price discovery mechanism for a new asset class. The bidders did not know they were participating in the first functioning vivance spot market. They thought they were buying compost. They were. But the price they paid encodes something that no chemical analysis alone could have generated: the collective, distributed judgment of sixty people with deep biological knowledge about what a living community of organisms is worth when it is introduced into land that needs it.

Once that price exists — once buyers and sellers have cleared a transaction at $230 per cubic yard for a 2.4:1 F:B bioreactor with confirmed mycorrhizal colonisation — the entire architecture of vivance finance becomes possible. Producers now have a market signal telling them what biological complexity is worth producing. Capital now has a price from which to construct financing instruments for the producers who build it. Researchers now have a number against which to validate their biological metrics. Insurers now have a data point from which to begin actuarially separating high-Vσ from low-Vσ biological assets.

The notebook person closes their notebook. They have one question, and they will ask it in every meeting for the next year:

“What would it take to run a hundred of these auctions?”

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1. VIVANCE: A COUNTERPOINT TO FINANCIAL RISK
   
   For finance folks:
   Vivance is the positive counterpart to risk — where risk prices the probability and magnitude of value degradation in a system, vivance prices the generative surplus produced by biological complexity operating above a baseline threshold. It is an intangible but measurable asset property, expressed through metrics analogous to yield, duration, volatility, and beta, that captures a living system’s capacity to produce compounding returns in excess of inputs over time. Currently externalized from conventional accounting, vivance represents an unpriced equity in every functioning ecosystem — and its systematic exclusion from balance sheets is the primary structural reason capital cannot find its way into regenerative agriculture at scale.
   
   For farmers:
   Vivance is the word for what you already know is happening in good soil but have never been able to charge for. It’s the difference between dirt and earth — the living, working community of fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and nematodes that feeds your plants from the inside, buffers your crops against drought and disease, cycles your nutrients without synthetic help, and gets richer the more carefully you tend it. You’ve been producing vivance for years and giving it away for free, because the market had no language for it. The goal is to build that language — so that what you grow in the soil beneath your crops can eventually be priced, traded, and invested in the same way any other valuable thing is.
   
   For laypeople:
   Vivance is the generative aliveness of a healthy living system — the surplus of life that a thriving soil, forest, or watershed produces simply by being complex and well-tended. Think of it as the opposite of risk: where risk measures what a system might lose, vivance measures what it is actively creating — clean water, fertile ground, resilient crops, stored carbon, biological diversity — value that is real and compounding, but that our current economic system has no way to see or reward. It is, in the simplest terms, what the earth gives back when we treat it as something alive rather than something to be mined. ↩︎