OPINION: Carbon intensity focus in agribusiness is good for planet, consumers

This opinion piece is written by Jan-Willem Bode, President of Puro.earth, and first appeared in Quantum Commodity Intelligence on Monday 21st September 2026

Every harvest already contains a carbon story. The fertiliser applied to a field, the tillage practice used to plant it, the way nitrogen is managed through the growing season — each of these decisions changes the carbon intensity (CI) of what comes off that land.

Almost none of this detail is currently captured in a form anyone downstream can use. It is not that the data doesn’t exist; it’s that it rarely survives the journey from farm to buyer, bank, or regulator in a state anyone can act on — priced into a purchase contract, relied on in a lending decision, submitted with a tax credit claim, or carried through into a buyer’s own disclosure.

That is starting to change, and it matters more than it might first appear. A lower-CI tonne of corn, wheat, or soy is not simply a better version of the same commodity, but it is closer to a distinct, verifiable product.

Once that distinction can be measured and trusted, it opens up genuine value.

For the farmer who adopted the practice, for the buyer trying to substantiate a claim about their own product or supply chain (such as a scope 3 reduction reported to investors, a low-carbon label on a finished fuel or food, or a tax credit claimed on a batch of feedstock), for banks who can lend against additional value and for the planet, which benefits regardless of who ends up capturing the credit.

The pressure to get this right is arriving from several directions at once, and agriculture sits at the intersection of all of them.

For example, in the United States, the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit now ties tax credit value directly to a biofuel’s carbon intensity score, calculated back through the feedstock to the farm, using USDA’s own Feedstock Carbon Intensity Calculator.

In Europe, the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation has moved from framework to certification methodology this year, with agriculture and agroforestry on mineral soils among the first three carbon farming activities covered.

Globally, the SBTi’s FLAG guidance increasingly requires companies with agricultural supply chains to substantiate land-sector targets with commodity-level data rather than sector averages.

No other part of the global economy has to potentially answer to a domestic tax credit, a regional certification regime, and a global corporate standard from the same underlying measurement. If companies in the agricultural supply chain can get the measurement right once, there’s an opportunity to serve all three potential use cases, where applicable.

Before landing on agriculture as a new place to focus, we looked across a number of adjacent sectors to carbon removal, asking ourselves a fairly simple question: where could independent, verified CI data actually add value, rather than simply duplicating something that already exists?

EU product methodologies increasingly prescribe how carbon intensity is calculated and reported for materials like steel and cement, which leaves less room for additional infrastructure to matter.

Agriculture is different. It remains genuinely underserved, and critically CI in agriculture can be attached directly to the physical commodity itself, rather than sold separately as a decoupled certificate.

This is where we see the first application of our new registry, but the use cases are numerous across different verticals.

Keeping that attachment meaningful depends on where the boundaries are drawn. A carbon intensity figure describes the emissions embodied in a delivered commodity — not a removal that can be sold separately.

Defining that boundary commodity by commodity is what keeps CI claims distinct from other environmental claims on the same land. It should reduce the risk of the same action being counted twice (or more) across programmes, registries or types of claim, and give buyers data they can trace.

This principle is one that defined how we developed our own approach to tracking agricultural CI.

That difference – attached to the commodity, rather than sold alongside it – is the crux of the whole argument. A book-and-claim certificate, traded apart from the underlying delivery, tells a buyer that a low-carbon attribute exists somewhere in the system, not that it belongs to the specific grain, fibre, or feedstock they are actually procuring.

CI data that stays attached to the commodity can be checked against what was physically delivered, financed against with more confidence, and used to support a specific claim about a specific shipment.

Cargill’s RegenConnect programme, which now covers more than a million enrolled acres and pairs farm-level practice data with independent MRV, is one example of what this looks like in practice: verified, farm-attached data that a buyer can actually stand behind, rather than an abstraction bought off to one side.

Heineken UK’s new malting barley programme, announced this month, points the same way. Working with its maltsters, merchants and independent agronomists Soil Capital, it aims to have almost half of the barley across its portfolio grown regeneratively by 2027, with growers paid a premium directly on those yields.

The premium farmers receive attaches to the barley actually delivered, and the outcome is independently measured rather than asserted.

These are just two examples. The potential to apply CI data to many different types of agricultural products and use cases is significant — across crops, livestock, biofuels, food processing, fibre and textiles and bioplastics.

For now, this is more about financial infrastructure than anything else. Verified, commodity-attached CI data must not be an additional reporting burden sitting on top of everything else agriculture already has to do.

Between the unprecedented droughts we’ve seen this year, heat at the wrong moment in the season, and collapsing yields, farmers are carrying quite enough already.

It is closer to investment-grade information, the same underlying logic that makes any environmental attribute bankable.

One well-measured dataset can support a claim anywhere in the world, be it a 45Z credit claim, a CRCF certification, or an SBTi FLAG disclosure, depending on who is asking, without the farmer or the buyer having to build three separate systems or fill in different forms to prove the same thing.

None of this, right now, is about carbon intensity becoming a headline number that consumers see on a label, though it may eventually feed into that.

Its more immediate value is that it lets the people making decisions, such as a lender assessing a loan, a company substantiating a scope 3 target, a regulator checking a credit claim, trust the number they are looking at.

While it might not be the most glamorous solution to build, it is increasingly something agriculture cannot do without.