Salesforce Buys 500,000 Rice Methane Credits in Five-Year Mitti Labs Deal

Salesforce has signed a five-year offtake agreement to purchase 500,000 satellite-verified methane reduction credits from deep-tech developer Mitti Labs by 2030, in a deal that expands climate-smart rice cultivation across smallholder farms in India.

The contract is the second major corporate purchase for Mitti Labs, following a similar agreement with Google — reported at 1 million rice methane credits — and it signals growing voluntary market demand for data-backed agricultural credits that target non-CO2 climate pollutants.

Why rice paddies matter

Agriculture accounts for 40% of human-induced global methane emissions, and continuously flooded paddy fields are a major contributor. The project's core intervention is alternate wetting and drying, a low-cost operational shift in which farmers replace continuous flooding with periodic drying intervals. The practice interrupts microbial methane production in oxygen-starved soils.

The numbers are material at the field level:

• Methane emissions cut by up to 50%
• Water consumption reduced by up to 40%
• No compromise on crop yields
• 700 billion liters of irrigation water projected to be saved across the operational transition

That water figure matters beyond the carbon ledger. The savings reduce pressure on regional aquifers in agrarian hubs that already compete with industrial and urban demand. In plain terms: this project sells carbon, but it delivers water.

How the credits are verified

Credit issuance is audited through Mitti Labs' proprietary GeoAI platform, developed in collaboration with NASA. The remote sensing infrastructure merges ground-truth field data with high-resolution satellite radar to track soil moisture, flood levels, and crop health across individual smallholder plots — verifying field dry-down cycles at scale.

The mechanism exists to satisfy buyer integrity requirements. Corporate purchasers of agricultural credits face persistent questions about additionality and measurement, and satellite radar monitoring is Mitti Labs' answer: performance and dry-downs are independently audited rather than self-reported. Verification, not goodwill, is the product.

What Salesforce said

"Superpollutant reduction is one of the best ways to slow near-term warming, and we are committed to directing capital toward high-impact mitigation efforts," said Jamila Yamani, Director of Climate & Energy at Salesforce.

The statement aligns with the company's broader procurement posture. Salesforce has also backed durable carbon removal pre-purchases through Milkywire, which recently completed eight new CDR transactions. The Mitti deal extends that capital into the methane side of the ledger.

Scaling targets and what comes next

Mitti Labs is scaling its project pipeline across India and Southeast Asia to meet institutional demand. The company targets an annual issuance of 2 million satellite-verified methane credits by 2028 — a fourfold increase over the volume Salesforce will absorb over five years.

Two commitments now sit on the calendar with deadlines attached: the 500,000-credit delivery to Salesforce by 2030, and Mitti Labs' own 2 million-credit annual issuance target by 2028. Both depend on enrolling enough smallholder farms and verifying enough dry-down cycles from orbit.

The milestone that decides what happens next is delivery against the 2028 issuance target; if the pipeline scales on schedule, rice methane becomes a repeatable institutional credit class rather than a boutique purchase.