By J.D. ALT
With great interest, I’ve been reading about the “Terraton Initiative”—a program designed to enlist farmers to sequester one trillion tons of carbon in their soil using innovative and “regenerative” planting techniques. The initiative was recently rolled out by Indigo AG—a young and rising Boston company recently named by CNBC as “the world’s most innovative company.” Indigo AG’s mark has been the establishment of a sophisticated platform enabling grain-farmers across the country (and around the world) to differentiate the quality-characteristics of their harvest (e.g. organic, non-GMO, heirloom varietal, etc.) and connect directly with buyers seeking those quality-characteristics. What got my attention was the fact that Indigo AG, with its recently announced “Terraton Initiative,” is now proposing to help farmers deploy strategies to maximize carbon sequestration in their fields—and then pay the farmers $15 for each ton of carbon they sequester. (Current agribusiness farming techniques, promoted by Archers Daniels Midland and Monsanto—now Bayer—add 4 billion tons of greenhouse gas to the earth’s atmosphere each year.)
