Floodgate combines satellite imagery, in-field sampling, and a payment ledger that puts $28/acre/year on average back to growers — for soil carbon they can prove with a core sample, not an estimate.
No model-only approach. Every credit traces back to a physical soil core, calibrated against a quarterly Sentinel-2 + Planet Labs imagery stack, and audited by an accredited verifier.
Before practice changes start, we take stratified cores to 30 cm and 100 cm. SOC stocks measured by dry combustion at an ISO-17025 lab. Bulk density measured on site.
Sentinel-2 (10m, weekly) + Planet Labs (3m, daily) feed a regional ML model trained on 28,408 ground-truth cores. Practice adherence (cover crop, no-till, biomass) detected directly.
Per-zone accrual stacked vs baseline. A 14% buffer is set aside in the permanence pool. Verra-accredited VVB issues credits annually after a desk audit + 5% field re-check.
When credits issue, ACH lands at the farm. 82% of credit revenue flows to growers; 18% covers measurement, audit, registry, and platform.
¹Verra VM0042 v2.0 · ²Gold Standard SLM Framework · ³IPCC AR6 100-yr GWP · ⁴ISO 17025 lab assurance
82 cents of every dollar reach the grower. The other 18 cover measurement, audit, registry, and Floodgate.
No upfront cost, no software fee. We pay for the cores, the lab, the verifier — and you keep 82% of every credit issued.
Verra VM0042 credits with full traceability — you'll see the farm, the cores, and the verifier's report behind every tonne you buy.
A 124-farmer co-op in northeast Iowa enrolled 84,408 acres in Floodgate's program in 2023. Year-3 payments crossed $1.4M, equal to roughly a 38% premium to baseline commodity income on enrolled acres.
We've been practicing no-till and cover crops for over a decade. Floodgate is the first program that actually measured what was already in the ground and paid us for it, instead of asking us to commit to something new and hope for the best.
The payments don't replace commodity income — they put cover-crop seed and a cleaner P&L on every farm in our co-op. That's what changed the conversation.
Every credit is issued on a public registry under a recognized methodology, audited by an accredited VVB.
Farmers don't pay. Buyers pay per tonne — with full traceability to the farm and the field.
We take an 18% service fee from verified credit revenue. Average grower earns $28/acre/yr, with top quartile reaching $48–$84/acre on intensive cover-crop + no-till systems.
Forward purchase up to 5 yr. Volume tiers from $148 (single-vintage spot) down to $112 at ≥48,408 tCO₂e forward purchases. Insetting tier separately priced.
Measurement is always hybrid. Baseline and 5-/10-year resamples are physical cores at ISO-17025 labs. Annual change estimates use a per-region ML model built on 28,408 ground-truth cores; current MRV uncertainty bands are 14–28% by region. We do not credit modeled accrual that we haven't already discounted for that uncertainty, and per Verra VM0042 we apply a 14% buffer pool on top.
Additionality is established by practice change against a 5-year practice baseline (per VM0042) and a financial-barrier test — a credit is only issued where the practice change wouldn't be financially viable absent the payment. Permanence is held by a 14% buffer pool and a 100-year monitoring commitment with reversal insurance underwritten by Munich Re. If carbon is lost through tillage, fire, or land-use change, credits are retired from the buffer to maintain integrity.
Projects are listed primarily on Verra under VM0042 v2.0 (Improved Agricultural Land Management). A subset of projects are listed on Gold Standard SLM and Climate Action Reserve where buyer demand is regional. Audits are performed by SCS Global Services, EPIC Sustainability, and Aster Global on a rotating cadence to avoid auditor capture — no VVB audits the same project two cycles in a row.
Yes — the program is designed so payments are net-additive to operating income, not a replacement for it. The 2025 Floodgate cohort averaged $28/ac/yr, which is roughly 12–18% on top of commodity revenue for corn-soy rotations in our footprint. Intensive cover-crop + no-till operators in the top quartile reach $48–$84/ac/yr. Farmers receive the full schedule before they enroll.
Soil carbon is generally more measurable and more verifiable than avoided-deforestation credits — every credit traces to a sampled field rather than a counterfactual scenario. The trade-off is slower accrual (1–3 tCO₂e/ac/yr vs much higher per-hectare rates for tree growth) and the saturation point of soil carbon over decades. For most buyers we recommend soil carbon as the durable, near-permanent floor in a portfolio alongside engineered removal (BECCS, DAC) for long-duration permanence.
Tell us your acreage. We'll run a free eligibility check, fly Sentinel imagery, and schedule baseline cores before planting.