Enrich Your Soil, Improve Your Profit Potential with Carbon by Indigo

A carbon credit is an offset purchased by companies and other buyers as one way to reduce their impact on the environment. As buyers make large scale commitments to drastically reduce their carbon footprint, they want to purchase carbon credits - which represent greenhouse gases removed or avoided - to drive environmental change beyond what they are capable of today within their organizations.

Verified carbon credits are approved and issued by third-party carbon credit issuers, in order to demonstrate the validity and value of the credit to buyers. When documented with evidence, carbon credits make it easier and more effective for organizations to reduce total carbon emissions.

Over the past year, companies all over the US and organizations throughout the world have been making multi-billion-dollar commitments to curb their impact on the environment. As of last year, nearly one quarter of all Fortune 500 companies have made a carbon neutrality commitment, an exponential increase over just a few years prior.

Carbon credits operate much like commodities. If you produce corn to sell, the buyer will want to know the quantity and quality. Grain handlers will want to facilitate that trade by meeting those information needs. So they weigh your corn and test it for quality so the buyer can have confidence in your product. Similarly, carbon credits estimate and track quantity through modeling and soil samples and protect for quality by creating stipulations on additionality and leakage. These quantification and qualification standards ensure the buyer gets the product they desire while the seller has a quality product to sell that earns top dollar.

• Adding cover crops (for the first time, extending the duration, or diversifying your mix)
• Diversifying your crop rotation
• Reducing or eliminating tillage
• Reducing fertilizer (reducing N or switching to injection)

Because carbon credits are sold the year after soil carbon is increased and emissions are reduced, credits are referred to as that year’s “carbon credit crop.” This means the 2021 crop includes credits generated from practice changes beginning at any point after the 2020 harvest and before the 2021 fall harvest (or before 2021 fall planting for winter crop fields).

Two primary reasons: 1) Valuable carbon credits are under high demand, and buyers are only willing to purchase credits that demonstrate a change. Credits generated as a result of practice changes are valuable because they represent new benefits to soil carbon and emissions reductions, above and beyond “business as usual.” 2) These types of valuable credits are extremely rare – that’s why buyers come to Indigo and are willing to pay high prices. That’s also why we’re able to guarantee a limited time credit payment minimum. Past carbon markets have been unsuccessful because buyers did not see the credits as truly valuable without the practice change requirement.

Participation in Indigo Carbon includes access to our free software platform for field data management. On our platform, growers can map and view field boundaries, and log and submit the field management information that is ultimately needed to calculate credits.

Management practice information includes 3-5 years of historical as well as current season details about planting and harvest dates, fertilizer types, amounts, and application dates, and tillage types and dates, as well as information on cover crop types, dates, and planting and termination methods, and organic amendments where applicable.