Agoro Carbon has issued its first batch of soil carbon removal credits, fulfilling the initial delivery under a 12-year agreement to supply Microsoft with 2.6 million credits. The credits, verified under Verra's VM0042 methodology, come from projects covering 2.5 million acres across 34 states and involve more than 600 producers. Agoro has paid over $30 million in upfront transition costs to help farmers adopt practices like cover cropping and managed grazing. The company says it collected more than 110,000 baseline soil samples, analyzed via dry combustion, with an average margin of error of 7.06% at a 90% confidence interval. Agoro plans to shift to Verra's updated VM0042 v3 methodology when it publishes in early 2027, which could align future credits with ICVCM's Core Carbon Principles. This issuance is a concrete test of whether large-scale soil carbon projects can deliver verified removals consistently.
