Dive Brief:
- Salesforce has signed a five-year agreement with agriculture-focused climate startup Mitti Labs to purchase 500,000 methane reduction credits, the companies announced Monday.
- The credits will be generated from sustainable rice farming projects across tens of thousands of smallholder farms in India, backed by Mitti Labs. The startup seeks to help rice farmers reduce methane emissions, which are generated in large volumes by flooded rice paddies, and water consumption.
- Mitti — which also means “soil” or “ground” in Hindi — launched in 2023 and has since leveraged artificial intelligence, satellite technology and field operations to permanently cut methane emissions generated from rice farming. The company said its work “transforms a critical agricultural sector into a high-integrity source of climate impact, water savings, and farmer income.”
Dive Insight:
The carbon credits are generated from a process that replaces the traditional flooding of rice paddies with a climate-smart irrigation method. This alternative practice has a lower cost and can reduce methane emissions by up to 50% and water consumption by up to 40%, without impacting the rice yields, according to Mitti.
To verify the emissions reductions, Mitti said it uses a NASA-backed GeoAI platform that blends high-resolution satellite radar with field data to keep track of flooding, soil moisture and crop health across individual smallholder plots. Mitti said in an Oct. 26 press release that this process leads to a result that is “transparent, independently verifiable proof of impact at a scale that manual monitoring can’t match.”
Mitti said its partnership with Salesforce will not only help cut methane emissions in rice farming, but will also save around 700 billion liters of water, which is roughly equivalent to 18 months of the city of Bengaluru’s water supply. The startup said this would ease pressure on groundwater resources in regions where different sectors compete for water use.
Methane is also a superpollutant greenhouse gas that contributes to warming the atmosphere more than carbon dioxide does on a per-ton basis. The potent gas is responsible for driving around 30% of global warming to date, according to an estimate from the International Energy Agency.
“We know that superpollutant reduction is one of the best ways to slow near-term warming, and we are committed to directing capital toward high-impact mitigation efforts,” Salesforce Director of Climate & Energy Jamila Yamani said in the release. “Reducing methane emissions from rice farming is a scalable climate solution that also helps preserve water resources for future generations.”
