Agoro helping farmers unlock carbon financing

Agoro Carbon Alliance, a body of farmers, agronomists and businesses, backed by Yara, one of the global crop nutrition companies, is working with farmers towards carbon financing by originating, verifying and selling carbon credits through sustainable agriculture.

Agoro works with farmers to create a stepwise plan to transition towards creating climate-positive farm management practices. As a result of this, Agoro quantifies the good that has occurred and packages that into a scalable carbon credit which when consumed by buyers in the market creates an additional revenue stream for the grower to benefit directly from.

The company aims to decarbonise farming and restore carbon to the world’s soil by implementing technologically advanced carbon cropping practices. It encourages farmers to maximise their carbon crop yield by leveraging climate-smart production techniques, thereby making carbon cropping a new income stream for farmers and other stakeholders across the value chain.

In India, it closely works with about 500 Yara Crop Centres, providing access to digital services with a direct link to four million farmers, helping them understand and address their needs, make data-driven decisions to decarbonise, protect yield and connect farms to farm carbon credit buyers.

Prithviraj Sen Sharma, founder, Agoro Carbon Alliance, told Telangana, “Agoro is an initiative where the farmer is at the centre. Globally, Indian farmers are known for their pragmatic approach and innovation. Agoro is bringing in direct market linkage to farmers. We are helping them unlock carbon financing. A carbon credit is equivalent to one tonne of carbon. We are providing the farmers agronomical and financial incentive.”

Telangana project

At a regional level, based on a memorandum of understanding and their association with the Telangana State Agricultural University, Agoro Carbon Alliance is working with the Government of Telangana.

He added, “The main focus is on our decarbonisation project of the Telangana food system with rice being the important crop. So, we are specifically focusing on the primary rice-growing areas in the rice belt of the State and have an intention to create a sustainable project for generating carbon credits through better crop nutrition, water management, and allied management services for rice cultivation.”

Agoro wants to create a long-term plan of action for farmers, provide agronomical expertise in carbon financing and anticipate cropping. “Pilot studies are in progress and over the next 3-4 years, a carbon development project will be developed in the State. In the next one year, the company will enter into new States in the north,” he added.

Yara Crop Centres

Yara Crop Centres will in future help the company mobilise more ideas and solutions for farmers. Agoro is also actively using technologies such as artificial intelligence and data science for sampling soil to capture data and use machine learning to study and evaluate the data.

The company finds data stewardship as key and is working with the World Economic Forum for the 100 million farmer initiative called ‘Lighthouse’. This data analysis helps farmers measure how effective their farm practises are.

“We try to balance what is good for the grower and what makes it profitable for us. We have about 500 Yara centres and by the end of 2021, this number will significantly go up to benefit a larger number of farmers across India. Crop nutrition centres offer a range of services and products. We provide fertilisers to farmers, as well as offer ancillary products and services. These centres are manned by local experts in agriculture from agronomical and machinery perspective. We plan to expand rapidly in India,” he added.