November 4, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

CIBO has announced the launch of CIBO Impact – a platform to help farmers generate and sell carbon credits based on their regenerative farming practices, and an online marketplace for individuals or organizations that want to purchase credits directly from U.S. farmers as a way to offset their carbon footprint. 

Developed to unlock the carbon market for approximately half a million American farmers, CIBO Impact will present the opportunity for scaling and accelerating regenerative agriculture by offering farmers a place to easily enroll their land and quantify carbon credits.

The registration process is free and completely automates the verification of regenerative practices and credits using CIBO’s remote sensing and computer vision capabilities. Once practices are verified, the credits are registered on the CIBO Impact marketplace over a single growing season – from cover crop planting in the autumn to the harvesting of a cash crop the following autumn.

CIBO Impact: Transformative Technology that Supports the Scaling of Sustainable Farming Practices

“I’m a fifth-generation farmer, and I’m looking ahead so if my kids want to be a part of this, they can. Doing the right thing supersedes everything else,” said Kyle Mehmen, general manager of MBS Family Farms in Iowa. “In the early 1990s, my dad got the first no-till soybean drill in our area, and for the past decade we’ve been experimenting and testing a variety of cover crops. In terms of carbon markets, what a lot of farmers don’t have is the time or money to go through a lot of hoops to participate in a program. CIBO Impact provides a simple and clear process from enrollment to verification to credit sale.”

Earlier this year CIBO launched its intelligence platform that gives farmers access to science-based, objective data about nationwide U.S. farmland at the parcel level, which will modernize how farmland is assessed and evaluated.

Founded by Flagship Pioneer in 2015, CIBO began as a “Zillow for farmland”, generating proprietary insights including land and lease valuation (including a price for every single parcel of farmland in the continental U.S.), productivity, stability, elevation, and environmental impact data on a per-parcel basis.

With offices in Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Boston, CIBO uses crop simulation, computer vision, and data science on an unprecedented scale together with machine learning, satellite images and scientific modeling to understand “how plants grow”.

The platform also centralizes publicly-available data (sourced from the USDA and other government agencies), including owner information, tax data, weather data, satellite images, and soil maps for farmers, investors, financiers, and stakeholders in the U.S. agricultural and rural land base.

Beyond information about the land itself, CIBO is also able to generate deep insights into the ecological effects of farming, calculating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, nitrate leaching, and carbon sinking in the soil over time. Together, this data is collated to create a quantified sustainability footprint for each parcel of farmland that can drive regenerative agricultural production methods, resulting in benefits for both the environment and society.

“Sustainable agricultural practices are environmentally and economically aligned in the long-term, but adoption has been relatively slow. CIBO is delivering a new approach to help farmers on this journey by enabling them to easily generate near-term, annual income for regenerative practices like cover-cropping and reduced tillage,” said Daniel Ryan,CEO, CIBO Technologies. “CIBO Impact has the potential to help nearly half a million farmers starting today.”

Now added to these capabilities is Regenerative Potential™ – the first of its kind sustainability metric that quantifies the land’s ability to sequester carbon and offset emissions under regenerative production management – giving farmers and stakeholders a clearer picture of the economic and environmental impact of sustainable agriculture. Drilling deeper, CIBO Impact also provides farmers the first field-level “what if” calculators that enable users to contrast the carbon footprint or yield impact for various practices on specific fields.

As a driver and accelerator of the transition to sustainable agriculture, CIBO Impact marketplace gives farmers a way to financially capitalize upon their transition by enabling parties interested in supporting sustainable practices, such as lenders, retailers, or input companies to connect with farmers that have related offerings. Likewise, organizations with public carbon and climate commitments can monitor their agricultural supply chain portfolios, and can support them through the purchase of credits from specific farms or even specific fields.

Having launched, CIBO Impact already has verified carbon credits from regenerative agriculture available for purchase on its platform. Visitors to CIBOtechnologies.com/getcarbon can view all participating farms and fields through CIBO’s Impact maps, and can easily target specific farms in which they’re interested. 

 
– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, and HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She is also a contributor to the GAI Gazette. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.