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🌐 20 Million Acres Later: Regenerative Ag Has Its Business Model

Author

Josh Dorfman
February 26, 2026

Indigo Ag is making regenerative farming the most profitable choice. Here's how.

Five years ago, I visited a large-scale commercial farming operation in Eastern North Carolina.

I was there to meet Fen Rascoe — a renaissance man: farmer, award-winning painter, and at the time, a Board Member of North Carolina's Industrial Hemp Association.

I'd gone because Fen was curious about Plantd, our carbon-negative products company, and we were curious about hemp.

It was a moment when hemp felt like it was ready to go mainstream  — economically promising, culturally inevitable.

But Fen wasn't starry-eyed about the opportunity.

Because a couple of years earlier, when the CBD craze was exploding, Fen had taken a risk.

A group of Colorado entrepreneurs convinced Fen — and his North Carolina farming co-op partners — to plant hemp at scale. They would grow it, harvest it, deliver it… and get paid.

Except, after the crop came in, the Colorado contingent didn't pay.

What Fen told me he did next shocked me.

He and his fellow farmers boarded a plane, flew to Grand Junction, Colorado, drove to the CEO’s house, and sat in his kitchen until they got their money.

It's a story I think about a lot, because it reveals something we consistently get wrong about farmers.

People assume farmers are conservative by nature. Cautious. Set in their ways.

Ryan Jones, VP of Sustainability at Indigo, has a different view:

Farmers aren’t risk-averse. They’re risk-saturated.

Weather. Debt. Input costs. Labor. Commodity prices. One bad season can set a farmer back years.

So when someone shows up and says, “Change how you farm,” the first question is simple:

Who’s carrying the risk?

That’s the problem Indigo was built to solve:

1. Pay farmers to adopt regenerative ag practices

2. Quantify the outcomes

3. Connect farmers to buyers—through carbon markets or corporate supply chains

Indigo was founded in 2013, and today operates in 15 countries, working across roughly 20 million acres globally.

On the buyer side, the company works with corporations like Walmart, Nestlé, Anheuser-Busch, and The North Face. 

Then there's Microsoft, which recently signed a 12-year offtake agreement for 2.85 million soil carbon credits. Long-term commitments that give farmers the confidence to start changing practices.

But this conversation is about more than keeping carbon in the soil.

It's also about water. It's about regions like rice country in the Mid-South — where companies see an existential supply risk, and farmers see an existential livelihood risk — and the only way through is coordination at an unprecedented scale.

Because with shared resources like aquifers, one farmer conserving water doesn't solve the problem if everyone else keeps pumping. The real lever is getting neighbors, conservation districts, states, and buyers to move together.

And underneath Indigo's business model is a simple, powerful idea: bring everyone to the table — and make the most practical thing the most profitable thing — fast enough to matter.

Indigo’s progress to date:

📍 1 million tons of greenhouse gas reductions

📍 100 billion gallons of water conserved

📍 Tens of millions of dollars in farmer payments

Here's what stood out from my conversation with Ryan.

Farmers aren't the obstacle. Risk is.

"There's so much risk involved in farming operations today that any request to change the way you're managing things is a significant ask."

A farmer with 40 growing seasons doesn't experiment lightly. Asking them to shift management practices over a five-year period — pushing back on decades of experience — is a major commitment. Indigo's approach: stop framing it as an intervention. Start framing it as partnering on the future of innovation on their farm. That shift opens the conversation to a dozen possible practices, lets farmers choose what fits, and gets projects moving.

The Microsoft deal isn't just a sale. It's a trust signal.

"We have committed offtakers for that time that we can point to and provide some assurance in our ability to ensure farmers get compensated appropriately. That's probably the single most influential piece of what that agreement stands for."

12 years. 2.85 million credits. Millions of acres. When Indigo sits across the table from a farmer wondering whether this program will still exist in five years, the Microsoft agreement is the answer. A household name with rigorous sustainability diligence doesn't sign a 12-year offtake on shaky science. That seal of approval travels — into conversations with other buyers, other farmers, and other parts of the market still deciding whether soil carbon is real.

The urgency lever isn't climate change. It's the water table.

"If you give up part of your water allotment, you give it up forever. But if farmers can band together — and they're incentivized by companies who rely on their continued productivity — it's a much faster conversation."

Abstract climate risk moves slowly. Local, immediate resource risk moves fast. When Arkansas rice farmers can see Texas — where water ran out, and the rice industry collapsed — as a preview of their own future, urgency is already in the room. Indigo's leverage is making that urgency actionable: get farmers in a region to commit together, bring in corporate partners who rely onthe supply chain, and solve the tragedy of the commons that individual action never could.

The majority of the money goes to farmers. That's the model.

"Across all of our programs, the vast majority of dollars go to the farmer. That's what builds the business. That's what grows it. It's driving dollars to the places where the action happens."

Payments are calibrated to practice: reducing nitrogen inputs costs less to adopt and pays less; cover crops can cost a farmer $50 an acre to implement and carry the highest Indigo payment. The goal isn't to fully offset every cost — it's to get farmers across the line and keep capital moving toward impact.

🌐 Supercool Takeaway

Indigo didn't build a carbon company. They built the infrastructure layer that makes regenerative agriculture economically rational for farmers and operationally reliable for the corporations that depend on them. When environmental and business risks are the same, urgency follows. That's the unlock.

Operator Takeaways

Sell the local problem, not the global one. Water tables and soil yields create urgency that climate abstractions don't. Get specific, get regional, and the urgency is already there.

Find where business risk and environmental risk overlap. That intersection is where corporations invest — not out of values, but out of necessity.

Anchor trust with names. Farmers need to know you'll be there in year ten. A 12-year Microsoft offtake says that better than any pitch deck.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

20 Million Acres Later: Regenerative Ag Has Its Business Model

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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