Spoke Notes from call with Anirudh Keny (Biz Dev) on Feb 15 2023
Claim to be able to assess soil organic carbon 30mn below soil surface at 10mn resolution with low error rates and that this approach has been accepted by Verra
Have registered 6 projects w Verra covering 5mn acres in 12 countries; using VM0042 v2 methodology
Have sold 150mn forward credits and are now rushing to fill supply
2 projects are actually certified by the registries which are in Mexico and South India (farmers adopting various practices that increase SOC)
For the South India project, expect farmers can get $10 to $12 per acre
While it varies by project, farmers get ~50% of credit value, remainder split between partner (whose cut is “low double digits”) and Boomitra
Boomitra views carbon finance as a gateway into providing advisory content to farmers. Idea is that farmers will see so much benefit (better yield, cost savings on inputs, etc.) from Boomitra’s advisories that the carbon offset revenue will be insignificant
And I guess farmers will be willing to pay for the advisory services? that wasn’t super clear. I found this angle to be a surprising twist and offered to share our perspective on digital advisory if helpful in future calls
One nuance is that today Boomitra is not recommending specific practices; they rely on partners (who also earn a cut of the carbon offsets) to promote whatever makes sense locally, Boomitra just measures the change in SOC and handles the carbon credit sale; they do provide partners a view to the farmers field
...
Likes the idea of FPOs as “information partners” (collect data, disseminate information on program and recommended practices) but in practice, tried working with an FPO who was supposed to map field boundaries and farmer practices; the data collected was poor quality and unusable
Because they can track to 10mn resolution, Boomitra is working with individual farmers. They didn't mention any of the typical issues we have heard from others about getting land records
To account for impermanence (eg, soil carbon get released bc of a flood), Boomitra keeps a 10 to 20% buffer pool
Boomitra suggested they can do an assessment in a certain geography and provide an estimate for how much offset revenue a farmer may be eligible for; their imagery goes back a few years so even farmers who switched to practices that increase SOC a couple years back could be eligible
I asked if Boomitra is working in AP with ZBNF / CMNF farmers since apparently they have reported increases in SOC from that aproach and his perspective is that not many farmers have adopted the approach and often farmers do ZBNF on a tiny portion of land and then “conventional” approaches on the remainder
...
Notes from call with Anirudh Keny (Biz Dev) on Nov 10 2021.
Next steps:
Bootmitra to share whitepaper that details how they are able to remotely measure SOC with a low error rate (<20% and in some cases lower than 5%)
| View file | ||
|---|---|---|
|
| View file | ||
|---|---|---|
|
POC: DG to share a list of 30 lat/long and plot area from AP / Telangana and Boomitra will send back estimate for SOC% over past 3 years along with potential payments to farmers from sale of carbon offsets
Boomitra would like to brainstorm how the carbon farming concept can be communicated to farmers
...