Soil carbon as bridge financing
Paul Gambill, CEO of Nori, on tokenized projects for social good
This reveals that soil carbon revenue is less a climate bonus than a financing tool that helps farmers survive the messy first years of changing how they farm. When a grower adds cover crops, cuts tillage, and rotates crops differently, the payoff comes later through better soil, lower fertilizer and fuel use, and more resilient yields. Carbon payments can fill the temporary cash gap while those operating benefits build.
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Nori structured the product around that transition period. Farmers generate Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes after third party quantification using USDA linked soil modeling, sign 10 year contracts, and are reverified every three years. Nori had sold about 86,000 tonnes and paid nearly $1.5M to farmers at roughly $15 per tonne, with farmers paying only about $4,000 for verification.
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The practical appeal for farmers is not just carbon income. The same practices can improve organic matter, water retention, fertilizer efficiency, and fuel costs. USDA describes COMET-Farm as a tool that models how changes like reduced tillage and cover crops increase soil carbon, which is the measurement backbone that turns a farming practice into a financeable asset.
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This is also where Nori differs from a traditional broker model. Instead of making money by buying low from project developers and selling high to buyers, Nori takes a 15% fee on top of the carbon price, so its economics improve when farmers are paid more. Comparable programs like Indigo also pitch soil carbon payments as a new farm revenue stream tied directly to measured sequestration outcomes.
Going forward, the winners in soil carbon will be the platforms that make regenerative practice changes feel financeable, not just measurable. If carbon payments become a reliable line item in farm economics, more acres can switch sooner, and carbon marketplaces start to look less like offset catalogs and more like agricultural financing rails tied to verified land outcomes.