Ed Smith, VP of Indigo Ag and head of Indigo Carbon, joins the show to talk about The Terraton Initiative: Indigo Ag's new effort to sequester one trillion tons of carbon dioxide through regenerative agriculture.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today, Christophe Jospe, my colleague here at Nori, he will be running the show. So Christophe, why don’t you take it away?
Christophe Jospe: Thank you, Ross. We are very glad to have Ed Smith, who is VP and head of Indigo Carbon at Indigo Ag on the line with us. Hello, Ed.
Ed Smith: Hey, guys. How’s it going?
Christophe Jospe: Really good. So we’re really excited to have you on because we wanted you to talk about the initiative that was announced by Indigo Ag two weeks ago called the Teraton Initiative. So for all the listeners who haven’t yet heard of this, what is the Teraton Initiative?
Ed Smith: So the Teraton Initiative is a global effort to remove a trillion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And the way we’re thinking about doing that is by putting in our agricultural soils, enriching our agricultural soils in a way that I think is near and dear to Nori’s heart through regenerative ag practices. So it’s a win for the environment. It’s a win for farmers because enriching your soil with carbon does so much in terms of farmers’ productivity, the resilience and the health of the soil. I mean, it’s a win-win for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Where does this fit into the rest of indigo ag and what is indigo up to generally?
Ed Smith: So Indigo’s goal is to improve farmer profitability and sustainably feed the planet. And so with that as our mission, you pretty quickly come to regenerative agricultural practices. What we’ve seen in our studies of regenerative ag and farmers practicing regenerative ag is that their profitability per acre increases significantly The nutrient density of their food increases significantly, and their soils just stand up to all sorts of extreme weather conditions much better. Whether it’s drought or flooding, you end up with better soils. And so in talking to farmers who practice regenerative ag, we saw that their carbon content was increasing substantially.
And so the way that this fits in with us is Indigo Carbon and the Territon Initiative becomes a way for compensating farmers for increasing their levels of soil organic carbon. And in doing that, we think we’ll accelerate the adoption of regenerative practices. And in doing that, accelerate the overall Indigo mission and business model and flywheel.
Christophe Jospe: This is very exciting. And Indigo made some announcements concerning the commitments that it would make for paying these farmers. Can you talk a little bit more about what benefits a farmer gets from participating with Indigo Carbon?
Ed Smith: Sure. So first of all, for any farmer who’s practicing, who already uses regenerative practices, it’s an additional revenue stream. Because now in addition to selling what they get from the land, they can also have a revenue stream for, I mean, it’s basically, it’s kind of like farming carbon. But for increasing those soil organic carbon levels, they’ll receive an additional revenue stream. And for other, for growers who are more on the conventional side, it’s a way to support them as they make that transition, which can be rocky at times. And but what we see is regenerative practices are more profitable overall for them.
And so we think it’ll be a nice catalyst for adopting those practices. So whether you’re on already on the regenerative side or thinking about moving into it, we think it’s good for both kinds of farmers.
Christophe Jospe: Definitely. And so you’ve already described two different types of groups. One are those who are already practicing regenerative farming, and the other are those who are more conventionally farming and considering transitioning to practices which can increase soil organic carbon. But what are the commitments that someone needs to make in order to participate in this program?
Ed Smith: To be honest, the commitments are fairly minimal, and I’ll explain why. So we need farmers to either own their land or have commitment and buy-in from the landowners in order to make sure that these practices as we make these transitions will have a chance of being around for a longer term. They can’t be taking... Any compensation for carbon now, like they can’t be selling their carbon credits elsewhere. That would be double counting and we want to maintain the integrity of these credits at all costs. And the last thing is sharing their data.
So we need a pretty open and transparent data sharing with our growers because that’s the way that we’re going to make sure that carbon levels are actually increasing. Other than that, there aren’t many commitments, because if a grower decided to not really change their practices, they could sign up for Indigo Carbon, but their organic carbon levels wouldn’t change that much, and so they wouldn’t get that much financially. In which case, that’s fine, because we’re paying for outcomes. We’re paying for actual increases in soil organic carbon levels. So we think it’s pretty easy for growers to sign up.
Christophe Jospe: Wonderful. So... Seems like you’ve got a pathway forward. What needs to happen between now and when the payments are actually going directly to the farmers for farming carbon?
Ed Smith: Yeah. So a grower signs up. We send our agronomy team on site to collect quite a bit of data. We take a soil sample. So we set a baseline. And now we have the point at which we can measure future carbon levels and say whether we’ve improved or not. Then the grower can hopefully change their practices, make moves towards regenerative practices, things such as that you guys talk about all the time on your podcasts, cover cropping, adopting no-till, reducing your synthetic inputs, integrating livestock. As those practices take hold and have an impact, we’ll go back, we’ll gather more data and We’ll do more soil sampling.
We’re also working to, part of the Terraton Initiative is the Terraton Challenge, where we’re working with a bunch of innovators and entrepreneurs to develop technologies that will enable this sort of thing at scale. And so we have our geo-innovation team that’s doing really fascinating and high-impact things with satellite imagery. We’re working on drones. We’re working on new technologies to assess levels of organic carbon in soil. But that will help us measure and monitor ongoing. And then as we collect the data, we’ll run it through our partners, folks like Nori, and we will assess the level of carbon increases in the soil and compensate accordingly.
And that’s basically the process.
Ross Kenyon: How might compensation work? I know making forward-looking statements like this can sometimes be tricky, but is there any idea for how much farmers might be expected to earn inside of indigo carbon?
Ed Smith: We’ve basically pegged the first 12 months of this at $15 to $20 a ton for growers. We got to that number by basically talking to growers, but also looking at the cost of carbon in a bunch of different markets around the world. We think that’s the right place to start. And so we’re going to help make the market for the first 12 months. But after that, we’ll let the market price this. And so we’ll open it up. But we think with we think with the levels of data transparency we have where you can actually if you purchase a credit, you could know which grower on what fields.
The digital platform we hope to build should bring radical transparency to this, which we hope helps keep the price per ton at a level that’s quite compelling to growers and also very interesting to corporations and foundations and individuals around the world.
Christophe Jospe: Wonderful. I like a lot of what you’re saying there, specifically around finding new ways to assess data and make verifiable claims and make it easy for growers to get paid to drop practices which are in their interest and in the interest of the bottom line. And also in getting us closer to removing one trillion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, which is quite a large number.
Ed Smith: It’s a big one. That’s a very big number. Totally feasible. Yeah. But it’s inspiring, I think.
Christophe Jospe: I couldn’t agree more. And I think inspiration and moonshots like this are what can galvanize a lot of action in a short period of time. So we are very excited. One of the things we haven’t yet talked about with the Terratone initiative is the Carbon Cup. What’s that about?
Ed Smith: Yeah. So, well, actually, I want to double back to the point you just made about galvanizing momentum and movement. We are fully aware that this is not something one organization can do on their own. And so one of the reasons that we made this big announcement was because we know it’s going to take An ecosystem, a coalition of like-minded organizations from a variety of places, a variety of geographies, a variety of sectors. So nonprofit, for-profit, frankly, governments. And so we’re really eager to partner with a bunch of different folks. And we hope that’s one of the things that comes out of this.
And so far, the outreach and connections we’ve been able to make have been fantastic. And so we’re excited to build those relationships deeper. So sorry, I went on a tangent there. Your question was, oh, right, the carbon cup.
Ross Kenyon: The carbon, there’s too much to talk about, it sounds like.
Ed Smith: It’s a pretty cool thing. I’d say it’s hands down the most fun I’ve ever had on a job and most inspired I’ve ever been on a job. So I’m quite excited for where we go from here. But the carbon cup, so yield competitions have long been a thing in agriculture. And so we basically and they’re compelling. The yield competition is very compelling. So we want to harness that same competitive spirit and sense of innovation for like individual grower on the farm, innovation and generation of new practices and approaches, because regenerative farming is pretty new.
And if there’s one thing having now spoken with many, many regenerative farmers, Their principles are the same, but the execution is different. And everyone is tweaking the recipe and the formula to see what works in their area with their type of soil. And so we want to harness that at scale and much more broadly. And so the Carbon Cup is basically a yield competition for carbon. Who can attain the highest levels of carbon in their soil and who can increase those levels the fastest? So it’s both for absolute numbers as well as rate of increase.
And we think both are quite interesting. We’re still developing the exact parameters of this, but we think we’re going to do awards for both of those categories at state levels. So we at least somewhat account for differences in geography and climate and things like that. But that’s basically what the carbon cup is. It’s a yield for, if you like this phrase, farming carbon.
Christophe Jospe: Amazing. I want to go back to the galvanizing momentum and broad scale collaboration, because that very much aligns with how Nori sees the world. And we’re totally with you on Team It’s definitely a team sport and finding ways to share what works, learn from what doesn’t, and move as quickly as possible in drawing excess CO2 out of the atmosphere. So in the spirit of broad collaboration, what can the world expect from Indigo and where do you see these efforts fitting into the larger scientific effort of estimating and quantifying carbon dioxide removal?
Ed Smith: Yeah, that’s a great question. So one of the pieces of the Teraton Initiative is the Teraton Experiment. And so we want this to be the largest, longest study of soil carbon ever conducted. We’re collaborating with quite a few different foundations and institute and academic institutions in order to gather a tremendous amount of data because we’ll be collecting it across, I mean, we hope, Millions and millions of acres in a bunch of different regions and geographies. And so our plan is to work together, have a open source platform. We’ll, of course, anonymize data from growers.
But aside from that, we want to make this an open source platform so that we can collaborate with a bunch of different scientific institutions and publish the results regularly, frequently to advance the conversation and the science. We wouldn’t be where we are right now without the science we already have. But for almost everyone we’ve talked to who is in the world of soil science, they would say, like, there’s a lot more to go. There’s a lot more to do. There’s a lot more that they want to see. And so we help to catalyze and partner with that and share the results for everybody.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, Ed, if someone wanted to check out Indigo Carbon and learn more about what y’all are doing, what might be the best way for them to do so?
Ed Smith: Head to indigoag.com backslash Teraton, or you can just go to the indigoag.com homepage, and the banner right now is for Teraton. On there, we have pages for detailing the Teraton overall, Indigo Carbon, the Teraton Experiment, the Teraton Challenge, and the Carbon Cup. There’s also specific pages for growers, for researchers and entrepreneurs, for consumers, and for potential partner organizations, whether those are corporations, foundations, nonprofits, or even governments. I think there’s some solid information there, but there’s also ways to get in touch with us through those sites. So that would be the way to do it.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, thank you so much for being on Carbon Removal Newsroom, Ed. We really appreciate it. And we’re glad to have more hands on deck for reversing climate change. It’s definitely, as you said, something that we can’t do alone. In fact, we felt a little insecure sometimes about our podcast, Reversing Climate Change, and numerous times have stated, we don’t mean to imply that we’re doing this alone. Please don’t write us emails accusing us of being indecently arrogant. But yeah, we’re happy to have as many people working on this as possible.
There’s a lot of stuff to work through and we’re happy to have more people thinking about it and great minds doing so. So thank you, Ed, for your hard work and we look forward to staying in touch with you.
Ed Smith: Likewise. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, guys. It’s been an honor being a long-time listener, first-time caller.
