Google has agreed to purchase 1 million carbon credits from Indian climate tech company Mitti Labs by 2030, backing a program designed to reduce methane emissions from rice farming while cutting agricultural water use.
Announced Friday, the five-year agreement will support climate-smart farming across 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of smallholder rice farms in India and save an estimated 1.5 trillion liters of water. Mitti Labs said the deal is the largest rice-methane carbon credit offtake to date, calling it “a powerful accelerator of our mission.”
The program will encourage more than 70,000 farmers to adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying, or AWD, an irrigation practice that reduces the amount of time rice fields remain flooded. The approach can cut methane emissions by about 50% while reducing irrigation water use by close to 40%, without sacrificing yields.
Satellite Technology To Track Farm-Level Changes
Mitti Labs uses a GeoAI platform combining satellite radar imagery with field data to monitor crop conditions, soil moisture and flooding at the individual farm level. The company says the technology is intended to make methane reductions measurable across large agricultural areas.
The partnership is expected to deliver an estimated 3 million tons of near-term warming impact reductions, measured using a 20-year global warming potential (GWP20) metric, equivalent to 1 million tons under the 100-year metric (GWP100), while saving billions of gallons of water.
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Google Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt said the company sees the approach as a way to address near-term warming while conserving water and helping farmers adopt improved water management practices.
Last month, Mitti Labs raised $9.5 million in a Series A funding round, led by Aramco Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle.
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