‘A pivotal moment’ for regenerative agriculture as Agreena secures Verra registration for soil carbon project

In what it says is a major milestone for the company, Denmark-based Agreena has just registered its AgreenaCarbon Project under Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS). This is the first time a large-scale agriculture project has registered under the VCS, which is widely considered to be the world’s top greenhouse gas crediting standard.

“Verra is the de facto standard for voluntary carbon markets, which makes its validating Agreena’s methodology a very, very important milestone for the company,” Agreena cofounder and CEO Simon Haldrup tells AgFunderNews.

The registration now enables the company to “meet the significant demand for high integrity, nature-based, European credits in the voluntary carbon market,” and Agreena expects issuance of Verra-certified carbon credits in 2025.

Farmer revenue streams depend on verifications

Putting the farmer at the center of regenerative agriculture is the key to scaling it, says Haldrup. After that, there are some key barriers to overcome, the most well-documented one of which is financial.

Overcoming financial barriers means being able to generate revenue streams for farmers through regenerative agriculture, he says. Finding a trusted way to verify, measure and quantify environmental outcomes is what will enable those revenue streams, he adds. More than that, “the entire scalable system stands on top of a digital-enabled, trusted way to measure and verify outcomes.

“When we started this journey [for the AgreenaCarbon project], it was very clear that we needed better validation in order to really scale this. We spent three and a half years doing so, and therefore we are extremely proud to be the first kind of scalable project to succeed,” he adds.

“This is a pivotal moment for the regenerative agriculture movement and steering much-needed carbon finance to farmers.”

Bringing down the cost of verification

The AgreenaCarbon Project works with farmers around Europe that are implementing regenerative farming practices to reduce emissions and remove soil carbon.

Carbon credits are calculated based on how much carbon a farmer has captured using practices such as cover crops, minimizing soil tillage, and using organic fertilizer, to name a few. Farmers can then sell their credits directly to buyers, bundle the credits with crops, or work with Agreena to find the best price. (Agreena takes a 15% broker fee.)

Agreena currently operates in 20 countries around Europe, working with 2,300 farmers.

While the type of farms the company works with varies, Haldrup says it tends towards larger operations at the moment, as they are better equipped to make a transition and because “the cost of verification is so high.”

He hopes to see that change in the future, thanks in part to a digital data platform Agreena has been working on in order to verify data at a lower cost.

“That’s a prerequisite to rolling [Agreena’s tools] out to millions of farmers,” he says. “Now we have the technology and the verified framework in place, so we can take this out to what is, at least in Europe, the backbone of agriculture: the small and medium farm.”

Agreena also has plans to move beyond Europe’s borders in the future.

A field-level climate solution

Regenerative agriculture as a climate solution is not without its critics, some of whom argue that storing carbon in the soil to slow global warming is “hard to back up” as a claim.

Verra itself was subject to scrutiny in 2023 after The Guardian published articles claiming the organization’s carbon credits were “worthless.” Verra refuted the claims and even sought legal council at one point, while the internet wasted no time chiming in on both sides of the argument.

Haldrup acknowledges that there are uncertainties in the verification process still, as well as risks. “It’s a biological process, and a hugely variant ecosystem,” he says. “We need to capture specificities of every single field that we’re calculating. Agreena captures more than 200 data points going back five years on every single field.”

A lot of the skepticism, he adds, comes from seeing carbon sequestration from a macro perspective instead of a micro perspective that zeros in on each individual field.

“We have to do this bottom up,” he says of advancing regenerative agriculture. “When you’re actually coming down to every single field, managing exactly every year the crops, practices, fertilizer, etc, taking into account climatic factors and so on, you start to take away a lot of the uncertainties in this. The other factor is that carbon sequestration soil can be reversed, and therefore you need to be able to monitor over time.”

“It has to ultimately be about the farmers’

Agreena also has plans beyond carbon credits, most notably with helping farmers access green loans and other financial benefits.

In 2024, Agreena announced a partnership with the International Finance Corporation to expand sustainable finance options to farmers by giving access to granular farm-level data to support eligibility documentation for financial offers.

“I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to more specific financial products to help farmers in that transition,” says Haldrup.

Last year also saw a partnership with CPG giant Mars to provide financial incentives for Hungarian farmers switching to regenerative agriculture practices.

“For any of this to scale, it has to ultimately be about farmers,” says Haldrup.

Beyond the financial barrier, the industry still grapples with equipping farmers with knowledge about regenerative agriculture as well as promoting regenerative agriculture throughout communities.

“It comes down to those three barriers,” notes Haldrup. “To really scale, we need to overcome those three things for every single farm.”