Indigo Agriculture announces the launch of Indigo Acres, a comprehensive new offer for U.S. growers transitioning to regenerative farming practices. Indigo is focused on delivering a portfolio of products and services that can help improve grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health; Indigo Acres brings this portfolio to the farmgate by offering a package that supports growers’ transition to regenerative practices. These practices can help improve the profitability of U.S. farmers by enabling a new revenue stream through carbon credits, providing premium pricing for sustainably grown grain through Indigo Marketplace, decreasing input costs, and improving a farm’s resilience to extreme weather.
Indigo Acres encourages and supports grower adoption of regenerative agricultural practices. These practices draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide and enrich agricultural soils. Examples of regenerative practices include cover cropping, diverse crop rotations, input reductions, reduced or no tillage, and livestock integration. By employing a data-driven approach, Indigo’s agronomists will make recommendations tailored to each field to make the adoption of regenerative practices easier, ultimately increasing the amount of carbon sequestered. From there, growers can get paid for carbon sequestration through Indigo Carbon, a key component of Indigo Acres. Subject to program rules for vesting and holdbacks, growers can earn $15 per carbon credit generated in 2020 if they sign up for the program before the end of this year.
“Transitioning to regenerative practices was a big leap for me,” says David Bachman, an Oklahoma grower based out of Grant County. “My farm is more profitable and now I can earn more for sequestering carbon into the soil. I didn’t have anyone helping me make these decisions and I could have accelerated a 10-year transition down to three or four years with the type of help Indigo is now offering.”
Indigo Acres is offered in three tiers, in order to better meet the needs of a wide variety of growers. Each tier offers increased agronomic support and associated tools to help growers transition to regenerative farming practices.
- Indigo Acres Standard. The first tier of Indigo Acres, Standard is available at no cost. Growers sign up for Indigo Carbon and Indigo Marketplace, an ecommerce platform for directly transacting on grain, through an online portal when enrolling.
- Indigo Acres Plus. Building upon Standard, Plus offers growers data-driven recommendations from agronomists through four in depth visits throughout the year, patented microbiome seed treatments, and grain quality testing to further a grower’s profitability potential.
- Indigo Acres Complete. The top tier maximizes growers’ soil carbon content and profitability. Complete includes year-round visits from an Indigo certified regenerative agronomist, microbial seed treatments, crop pricing tools, premium buyer contracts, and handheld grain quality testing, among other components.
“At Indigo, we believe that to address three of the biggest challenges in agriculture, grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health, we have to question the whole system,” says David Perry, Indigo’s CEO. “We see the adoption of regenerative practices as an important part of that change, and have designed our new tiered offer, Indigo Acres, to help growers make that transition.”
