Boston-based regenerative agriculture company Indigo Ag has been making impressive strides on the voluntary carbon market, emerging as one of the leading providers of nature-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) through its soil-centric operations that improve the sustainability and profitability of the agriculture industry.
The company’s success appears to be underpinned by a strong commitment to scientific principles and tech innovations that help create soil improvement projects, opening new, sustainable income streams for local farmers.
This rigorous setup is what helped Indigo Ag secure its first carbon credit sale with tech giant Microsoft back in June 2024, when the two companies signed a purchase agreement for 40,000 carbon credits.
That same year, Indigo locked in financing from the BIRD Foundation, wrapping up a successful 2024 with the signing of a deal for the delivery of 250,000 carbon credits for climate finance company Catona Climate.
In April 2025, Indigo Ag made headlines by delivering nearly a megaton of CO2 removal, issuing almost 1 million soil carbon credits. This momentum was kept alive with the signing of a new agreement with Microsoft in May of this year, when the global corporation agreed to buy an additional 60,000 carbon credits from soil CDR in the United States, and a regenerative agriculture collaboration signed with Google around the same time.
Besides delivering impactful carbon removal tracked with cutting-edge MRV systems, Indigo’s operations also contribute to significant water savings that amounted to more than 64 billion gallons of water conserved by April 2025.
Its MRV capabilities are also used to help companies in the food and agriculture industry reduce Scope 3 emissions and produce lower-CO2 crops for biofuels, while its digital and biological solutions, like plant-boosting biostimulants, enhance the health and resilience of agricultural crops, and its carbon program returns 75% of the credit value directly back to the farmer.
The eye-catching track record of delivering substantial CDR volumes at an upbeat pace is what makes Indigo Ag stand out as one of the most promising suppliers in its sector.
At the Carbon Unbound Europe Summit, held on October 21-22 in London, our team got the chance to talk about the company’s journey so far and prospects ahead with A.J. Kumar, PhD, VP of Science & Innovation at Indigo Ag.
What would you say are the key selling points for attracting a major buyer like Microsoft?
One of the core selling points has been positioning ourselves as a science-first company.
We took a design from the very beginning to do this in probably the hardest way, but we think also probably the highest quality way to make sure we could build standards that buyers like Microsoft could trust.
This approach has paid off in the long run, but it was definitely very challenging at first to get things off the ground, because we had to help with designing new methodologies, getting new models updated, and getting new approaches for quantification verified.
Relevant: Microsoft Buys New 60,000 Soil Carbon Credits From Indigo Ag
One core part is making sure the approach is science-heavy and science-first, but then also making sure it’s feasible and works for the communities we’re working with, in this case, agriculture and farming communities.
We had to make sure it’s not just some small niche, but it can actually help the majority of farmers and can deliver a lot back to them. That’s also been one of the core selling points to very critical buyers; they want to see that investment impact.
How big of a factor do co-benefits represent in such deals?
They are becoming increasingly more valuable to buyers, especially in the nature-based sector, where we have a lot of strengths in terms of speed and scale, but there are continuous challenges in terms of long-term durability claims that we can make because it’s a managed land compared to an engineered solution.
The immediate impact that it can have on the atmosphere is one plus, but the immediate impact on communities is another core reason for the investment. The other very interesting thing from a tech buyer perspective is these co-benefits actually sometimes become the primary benefit.
For example, the deal we had this summer with Google in Oklahoma, where they have set up a large data center, employs regenerative agriculture as a way of supporting the watershed around that data center, as one of the other benefits of regenerative agriculture is water retention improvements and reduced runoff. This way, regenerative agriculture helps with watershed replenishment, which is a core goal that they have around their data centers.
In that case, the water is actually the thing that’s driving the ecosystem market and we see this as a positive trend. Whatever the ways we can leverage, all the impacts that nature and soil can have and create value and add markets to that, we can drive more change.
What’s the system behind your fast-paced deliveries at eye-catching volumes?
It’s about investment in the technical infrastructure.
A huge amount of work we’ve done is on the software side. In terms of data collection, we want to collect data from thousands of farmers, and this has required getting to a system that’s very smooth and consistent and can give live feedback so that if we catch an error, we can correct it right on the spot versus having to go back to a farmer three months later.
We had to learn a lot of that just from doing this a few times, so the first issuance we went through was painful. We learned a lot, and we invested in the software to solve that, so that this fifth verification we’re going through would be our biggest issuance yet.
It was incredible to see that process get simpler while still maintaining the quality and rigor, and we’ve achieved this by leveraging remote sensing and satellites, model sensitivity analysis from our quantification packages, and a streamlined user design, reshaping the user experience in alignment with relevant feedback.
Read more: Indigo Ag Sets Record Carbon Credit Delivery To Microsoft
A mix of those things led to this giant time reduction. We went from eight hours for data entry to less than 30 minutes for the same kind of level of information from farmers. So that’s a huge part of it, but then also making sure that that translates to the verifier views, and we can submit to the registry, and they can have an easy way to see all the data across the project and verify what’s really happening.
We did all that work to ensure the data in is high quality and verified as we get ready for scale, and this has been critical for getting to that delivery speed.
Can you tell us about the farmers’ benefits in your carbon program?
In our carbon project, 75% of the ecosystem payments we get goes to the farmers, while 25% goes to us and the partners. We work with local partners like local farmer cooperatives or other companies that have a trusted relationship with the community. The farmers really get the majority of the income from generated credits, while they provide us with data, where they sign up and commit to maintaining that practice, that’s why we think they should get the majority of that value.
Are farmers trained on providing data?
That’s part of what we’ve done with our software and data collection experience.
We have some growers that come and do it directly themselves, and we have a customer support and success team to guide them on the records they need to keep.
We’ve done general education for folks that are in our program, covering how to start to keep these records if they want to participate in these markets for us or anyone else, because these are the things that are important.
We also work closely with the Ag retailers that the farmers trust and work with so that they can have that training and to support them in that data collection and submission process.
What needs to happen for soil carbon to attract more buyers?
We would love to see the sector continue to grow. If you think about natural ecosystems, soil is one of the largest natural reservoirs of carbon in the world. It’s actually bigger than all the biomass. But we’re such a small fraction compared to, say, forestry credits in the broader nature-based market, and we’d love to see more folks valuing and investing in soil carbon projects.
We’re seeing good-quality projects like ours and others starting to issue credits at scale, that’s one of the strengths that we can provide, speed and scale, as solutions that are also having a positive impact on local communities and economies. So we’d love to see more buyers come into the segment and see the opportunities here.
There’s also a lot of amazing storytelling you can do around investing in these local communities where, even if you don’t have agriculture in your supply chain, maybe you have a manufacturing facility or a data center close to the farmland, and there’s an opportunity to show that you’re investing in that broader community for the broader ecosystem impacts that you can have.
I think we’re starting to see some of the buyers really lean into that as one of the reasons they invest; we’d love to see more folks think about that opportunity.
What are the current challenges in soil carbon removal?
The challenges are around communicating how we manage uncertainty, and I think it’s about perceptions of uncertainty in the science. And I say perception because I think we actually have a lot more certainty in the science than the most skeptical people would claim.
Certainly we don’t know everything about the science in terms of there being a huge variety of different crops in the world, a huge amount of soil classes. We’re not trying to do everything. We’re trying to say, where is the science strong? Let’s make the projects there, and let’s invest in the research to expand projects to the rest of the types of agriculture.
On the uncertainty side, there are also a lot of concerns and thoughts going into how do we think about the durability of soil carbon removals. If someone passes away or is handing down the lands to their children, how do we know that they’re going to continue? There is some work we have to do just to show the data so we can operate from it rather than operating from opinions.
We’re starting to get that data through our projects; we’re starting to see some of those transitions happening. By and large, when I talk to younger farmers and others, they tend to be more interested in thinking about soil health and investing in land, doing things differently, and being more data-driven than the previous generation. So some of the concerns a lot of the buyers might have, I think, are largely overstated, and I hope we can prove that with data.
What are the ambitions for Indigo Ag going forward?
We’re looking to see how we can continue to grow the soil carbon market, but we’re also very excited to continue to expand on the Scope 3 front.
One of the other beautiful things about agriculture in Scope 3 is that we have not just the offset market, but there’s also the inset side, where a lot of the goods produced from agriculture, go to various companies, whether that’s the North Face that makes cotton for their uses cotton for their t-shirts, or Anheuser-Busch, who’s buying rice to go into some of their beer, or other alcohol production. Those are two of the companies that we’ve done projects with in the past to provide support within the supply chain, and we’re seeing continued growth there.
There are a lot of opportunities, as companies think about their overall strategy to invest within the supply chain.
I think the other big one is the waterfront that I mentioned earlier. We’re very excited to see, can we grow that segment? I think it’s one of the next frontiers, as water is another ecosystem service outside of carbon that is very visceral for people, for supply chains, and for companies and communities. Having solutions that can actually address water in a really meaningful way, at scale, I think will be a really exciting place for the future.
We’re also starting to investigate the opportunities on the other side of Indigo’s business, our microbial solutions or biologicals, exploring how these two things can play together.
We have products that help increase yields and reduce stress from water, disease, or pests like nematodes, so we are now starting to get the data to look at the environmental impacts of those biologicals as a potential value for either supply chains or other markets, while still aiming to be driven by the science.
How does the CDR sector attract more buyers?
One of the big things with the carbon removal space is we need to be a bit more collaborative in terms of the approach.
There are multiple pathways, and I think sometimes we get in our way by deeming one pathway as better than others, and I think we need to look at the fact that all the pathways have different values.
Ideally, the buyers will look for a portfolio CDR approach; that’s why we need to be boosting all of them. For example, some of the engineer pathways don’t have to worry as much about some of the durability monitoring in the long term, but we’ll have different challenges on speed and scale.
There’s opportunity for the nature-based solutions to work together with that portfolio buyers’ approach in mind.
Otherwise, we just create more confusion in the market by beating up on each other instead of lifting this whole market up together.
