Massachusetts-Based Agricultural Technology Company is Trying to Remove One Trillion Tons of Carbon From the Atmosphere

August 26, 2019 – Indigo Ag has launched The Terraton Initiative, to sequester one trillion tons of CO2 into agricultural soils. It has invited technology companies and other businesses to focus on using agriculture as a climate change mitigator. Companies that wish to participate can apply to join the Initiative by October 1, 2019 with the first critical areas to focus on:

• Accelerating soil carbon sequestration
• Developing methods to quantify soil carbon
• Creating rewards for growers to capture and maintain soil carbon

The Initiative is open to all innovators from around the planet with concepts, ideas, and working solutions that can be demonstrated at an agricultural conference planned for Memphis in June, 2020. From application to award, the Initiative will pick semifinalists eligible for each to receive $60,000 USD in grants, and up to $3 million in contracts. The conference itself will serve to be the point when these improvements will be demonstrated. Final cash awards will be given out in October, 2020.

Through this Initiative, Indigo Ag hopes to improve global farm performance while addressing climate change. To help those who apply, Indigo is gathering a group of mentors to assist applicants on research and validation, and will pilot test all entrants on the company’s own land.

Accelerating Soil Sequestration

Drawing CO2 from the air to sequester it in farm soils provides three benefits. The first is: it gets rid of the greenhouse gas emissions having the greatest long-term impact on global atmospheric warming. The second is: it improves the quality of the soil so that it is more resilient to drought, floods, heavy rains, and capable of retaining more nutrients of benefit to plants. And the third is: it means farms can participate in Indigo’s carbon market earning credits that can be turned into cash.

What kind of solutions can accelerate sequestration? Here are a few:

• planting perennial crops as opposed to annuals (i.e., cereal crops)
• no-till practices as opposed to ploughing the soil after harvesting
• adding to a soil’s microbiome
• in-field bio-char solutions to improve organic carbon content

Quantifying Soil Carbon

Today the best way to measure soil carbon content is taking core samples and sending them to a laboratory for analysis. This is time consuming and expensive. In solving this challenge Indigo seeks accurate, efficient, low-cost soil carbon analysis to be done both in-field and remotely.

What kind of solutions can help measure soil carbon more effectively? Here are a few:

• new 50 centimeter (just under 20 inches) or greater soil sampling extraction tools
• tools for measuring bulk density
• autonomous systems to extract soil or direct soil carbon quantification
• handheld or planted sensors and tools for in-field carbon analysis
• drone and satellite remote analysis tools
• automated in-field and in-lab processing
• better software algorithms to determine where to sample

Rewarding Soil Carbon Sequestration

Farmers need market incentives to pay attention to soil carbon as critical to their operations. By accounting for soil carbon as one way of rewarding growers for achieving success, the agricultural industry could see regenerative practices take hold to mitigate climate change and ensure better yields, all based on sound scientific principles.

What are the kinds of solutions being sought?

• New insurance products, government policies, and landlord-tenant cost-sharing instruments that reward carbon sequestration best-practices
• short and long-term financing of regenerative practices
• better balancing of agricultural economics with ecosystem capacity
• new methodologies for carbon credits

The Industry’s Moment to Change

What Indigo hopes, through its Initiative, is to see is a union of farmers, scientific researchers, businesses all along the food chain, and investors working collaboratively to improve farm profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health.

Stated David Perry, CEO and Director of Indigo Ag, at the launch of the Initiative, when talking about sequestration of carbon in soil, that it is the “single most actionable, immediate, and affordable thing we can do to impact climate change.”

Perry noted that globally on average farms today sequester around 1% of carbon whereas raw land sequesters between 3 and 7%. By getting all working farms, amounting to nearly 1.5 billion hectares (about 3.6 billion acres ), to a 3+% level of sequestration globally would achieve a one trillion tons of atmospheric carbon goal.