Carbon by Indigo — National Soil-Carbon Payment Program

Launched in 2019, Carbon by Indigo enrolls US row-crop farmers who adopt cover cropping, reduced/no-till, and diversified rotations, paying them a share of revenue from soil-carbon credits sold to corporate buyers such as Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase. About 1,000 farmers and roughly 7 million acres have been enrolled, with credits issued through the Climate Action Reserve registry, later aligned to the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market's Core Carbon Principles.

Successive issuances have grown from 20,000 tons CO2e in the first 2022 batch to a cumulative total Indigo describes as "over 2 million metric tons verified" through a fifth issuance, though independent trade reporting placed cumulative storage at "almost a million tons" around the same period — a discrepancy reflecting differing reporting dates and definitions rather than a resolved figure. Credits have recently sold for $60–$80 per ton, below the roughly $100/ton the industry says is needed to move past early-adopter buyers. A Climate Action Reserve buffer pool withholds 14% of approved credits against reversal risk, with Indigo retaining a further 5%.

The program has also drawn sustained scientific scrutiny. A Science/AAAS investigation examined an internal dispute over the USDA/Colorado State COMET-Farm modeling tool used across parts of the sector, in which an investigation committee found the team had improperly described model outputs as "accurate," a claim later removed from public materials. Earlier reporting by the Food & Environment Reporting Network quoted soil scientists warning that most protocols sample only the top ~30cm of soil, that gains are not permanent once practices lapse, and that soils are "not a bottomless carbon sink."

Read the full analysis: https://trellis.net/article/indigo-ag-boomitra-soil-carbon-credits/