Key takeaways

• After years of slow growth, issuances are on a tear.
• More data and better models are helping win over skeptical buyers.
• Soil carbon credits are now a viable option for many, but some environmental groups remain wary.

Just five years ago, the idea of locking away carbon dioxide in farmland soils was one of the hottest areas in carbon markets. New startups were entering the field and major companies, including JPMorgan Chase and IBM, were purchasing soil carbon credits.

That momentum all but disappeared as questions surfaced about the science behind the idea and projects took longer than expected to be approved. But the work quietly continued and the field appears to have turned a corner, with a flurry of credits issued in recent months. Indeed, 2025 might be the year when soil carbon begins to deliver on its promise.

“The sector has gone through its own Gartner hype cycle,” said Aadith Moorthy, CEO of Boomitra, a soil carbon project developer. “2024 was probably the trough of disillusionment. We are recovering from the trough right now.”

Moorthy was referring to the cycle of inflated and then dashed expectations that emerging technologies often pass through as they mature. In the case of soil carbon, the hype rested on the enormous promise of regenerative agriculture techniques, including cover crops and reduced tillage, to sequester carbon. In 2019, scientists estimated that farmland soils in the U.S. alone could draw down 250 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. 

Scalable solution

Carbon markets promised to provide the funding farmers needed to deploy those techniques, prompting a burst of startup activity around the start of the decade. But getting projects validated by Verra and other major registries took longer than expected. Some environmental organizations, notably the World Resources Institute, also questioned the mitigation potential of regenerative agriculture. Amid the delays and doubts, Nori, a prominent soil sequestration startup, shut down last September. CIBO, another company that sold coil carbon credits, is now pursuing different lines of business in agriculture.

But other project developers have been able to ride out the downtimes. Although the scientific debate continues, it’s widely agreed that the models used to estimate soil carbon levels have improved, in part because project developers are continually collecting soil samples to help ground the estimates. “It’s gone from science fair to a scalable kind of solution,” said Ewan Lamont, head of sustainability solutions at Indigo Ag, one of the original project developers.

Indigo’s first batch of soil carbon credits, issued in 2022, totaled 20,000 tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. It’s third crop, released in 2024, received an important vote of confidence when Microsoft, by far the largest buyer of removal credits, purchased 40,000 tons. The company’s most recent issuance, announced last month, was for 630,000 credits, bringing the total the company claims to have stored in U.S. farmlands to almost a million tons. The most recent credits cost between $60 and $80 per ton, said Lamont.

One of Indigo’s rivals is Boomitra, which works with farmers in lower-income countries. The company issued its first batch of 47,000 cropland credits from smallholder farms in India last month. A second issuance of around 300,000 will follow later this year, added Moorthy. Because costs are lower in India, Boomitra’s credits sell for less than $40, he noted.

Beyond the ‘regen curious’

Both companies are now targeting scale. Lamont identified $100 per ton as a “catalytic” price that would unlock interest that goes beyond the “regen curious” U.S. producers that have been the first adopters of cover crops and other tec