Deep-tech agricultural enterprise Mitti Labs has secured a five-year carbon credit offtake agreement with Salesforce to expand climate-smart rice farming across tens of thousands of smallholder farms in India. The partnership, which follows closely on the heels of a similar agreement between Mitti Labs and Google, highlights the growing corporate appetite for satellite-verified agricultural methane credits as a scalable offset solution with immediate climate impacts.
The initiative funds the transition from traditional continuous field flooding to alternate irrigation, a low-cost practice that allows rice fields to dry out during safe windows in the growing cycle. This shift specifically targets methane emissions generated by microbial growth in oxygen-depleted soils, successfully reducing methane outputs by up to 50 per cent and water usage by up to 40 per cent without compromising crop yields. Agriculture currently accounts for 40 per cent of all human-induced methane emissions. Because methane traps 85 times more heat than carbon dioxide but degrades in the atmosphere within a decade, immediate reductions are highly effective for slowing near-term global warming.
To ensure the integrity of the carbon credits, Mitti Labs utilises a proprietary GeoAI platform developed with support from NASA. The technology merges high-resolution satellite radar with field-collected ground truth data to monitor soil moisture, crop health, and flooding levels across individual plots, providing buyers with transparent, independently verifiable proof of impact that surpasses manual monitoring. The company projects that the Salesforce partnership will save approximately 700 billion litres of water, roughly equivalent to 18 months of municipal water supply for Bengaluru, thereby alleviating pressure on groundwater resources in regions where agricultural demands compete with urban consumption. Driven by corporate commitments, Mitti Labs aims to issue two million credits annually by 2028 across its Indian and Southeast Asian operations.
Jamila Yamani, Director of Climate and Energy at Salesforce, noted that as a founding member of the Beyond Alliance’s Superpollutant Action Initiative, the company is committed to directing capital toward high-impact mitigation efforts. She added that reducing methane emissions from rice farming is a scalable climate solution that simultaneously preserves critical water resources for future generations.
Xavier Laguarta, Co-Founder of Mitti Labs, stated that carbon credit buyers are increasingly demanding transparent, visible impact metrics. He noted that securing consecutive backing from major technology firms demonstrates that high-integrity, data-verified agricultural credits are becoming central to serious corporate offsetting strategies. With this expanded funding, Mitti Labs plans to deepen its community engagement programmes and expand the digital twin datasets that support its climate-smart agricultural roll-outs across the region.
