Peoples Company And CIBO Partner To Generate Carbon Credits For Regenerative Practices

Peoples Company and CIBO Technologies announce they have entered into a partnership to offer carbon credits on more than 20,000 acres of land, managed by Peoples, an Iowa-based land transaction and advisory firm.

“From our perspective, the money is out there, the money is ready to flow (to farmers) on this carbon marketplace, but it needs help getting into the marketplace,” Steve Bruere, president of Peoples Company, told Chip Flory, Agri-Talk host. “It needs groups that can monitor the activities and make sure that the practices are in place and report back. And so, that's what this partnership is all about,” Bruere adds.

Through the partnership, Peoples has committed to initially enroll over 20,000 managed acres in the CIBO Impact platform, creating potentially $400,000 of new revenue for owners and operators in the first year when all credits are verified and sold, according to a news release the companies released jointly.

Additionally, Peoples Company and CIBO are working together to create partial incentive pre-payments for enrolled land. Under the partnership, for the first time, growers and owners will be eligible to receive immediate incentive payments against expected future sales of carbon credits.

Practical Application. The CIBO platform works as a portal, enabling carbon buyers and sellers to find each other in the online marketplace. CIBO CEO Dan Ryan says several types of customers use the site.

“(They include) farmers who want to enroll land in the carbon market and carbon buyers who want offset their footprint, and these could be individuals or a corporation,” Ryan explains. “The (third) user of the platform would be companies that actually just want to understand and manage portfolio plans in a software platform.

“There's no regulatory framework, so we're learning as we go,” Ryan adds. “The one thing I think that we all agree on is we want these regenerative practices to occur. Everybody agrees that they are needed and necessary, and we felt that the best way to do this was to try and create a scalable process that really supported growers, where they could see a steady revenue stream – money flowing to them directly for these practices.”

Covered practices currently include various nitrogen applications, tillage, irrigation and cover crops.

A Learning Process. Bruere adds that Peoples Company was looking for someone like CIBO to partner with on the pilot project.  “They’ve got the landowners in their system and access to the marketplace in order to market the credits,” Bruere says. “It’s really plug and play with our ability, with our boots on the ground and our acres, and we’re excited to see where it goes. This is as much about learning as it is getting the initial payments for our landowners.”

As for the size of payments available to growers who participate, Bruere says “a lot of Midwest farms may be looking at $20-an-acre-type payments. You’re not going to get rich, but it’s a nice value-add and every little bit helps.”

Bruere adds that farmers who are able to combine carbon credit payments with some of the cost-share programs available through USDA will see additional value.

Ryan says he agrees with Bruere’s perspective. “I think that's exactly right; this is an incentive,” he says. “I think there are other layers of incentives that can be stacked on from other programs that can make a (dollar) number bigger, and I think that's what we'll have to get to.”

More information is available at  https://www.cibotechnologies.com/mp/carbon.

The full discussion on Agri-Talk is available here: