5.5 million acres are enrolled and 2,000 farmers are participating in what Indigo Ag is calling “The Dawn of a New Harvest”. A new kind of crop is here — carbon. Indigo Ag has issued 133,000 carbon credits to those farmers enrolled who have made a practice change, like planting cover crops or going no-till.
“A carbon program you can always enroll in,” says Chris Harbourt, chief strategy officer for Indigo Ag. “If you’re willing to make a practice change, you’re eligible for a carbon program and we’ve got the highest quality program paying the highest prices for carbon.”
Intermixed with their carbon program, Harbourt says there are companies that want to purchase the end product because they know it was grown sustainably.
“They’re buying corn or soy or a corn syrup that’s going into one of their products or a soy oil or a soy crush that is going into an animal operation. Those companies are looking to pay a little bit extra, a few pennies a bushel, on top of what they would normally pay as a basis, a premium price. And that leads us to be able to work those programs into the carbon program. If those programs are paying a little more than carbon, that’s what you get to do in that year, in that location.”
Harbourt says these companies have made commitments to their boards of directors and investors about their impact on the global environment, looking to reduce their carbon footprint.
“If we work with a farmer, pay them a little more to implement a new practice, we get a more valuable product on the other end, or we’ve reduced our footprint on the atmosphere. That makes our business and our product more valuable. We’re going to share some of that back in the supply chain. That’s what we’re trying to do as Indigo is make sure that connection is made all the way back to the farm. So often that can get jammed up somewhere in that supply chain, whether it’s at the aggregator or the processor, and they take the whole thing, and it doesn’t make it back to the grower. We’re adamant about getting it all the way back to the farm gate and making sure farmers are getting what’s coming to them.”
If you’re thinking about a practice change, visit indigoag.com for more information.
