Hummingbird Technologies is pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with Commoditrader, the Danish creators of one of the world’s first certified agricultural carbon credit schemes.
Hummingbird will apply its data science and remote sensing solutions to detect and verify key sustainability metrics at field level to unlock carbon certificate payments for farmers who are sequestering carbon through regenerative practices.
Commoditrader’s carbon programme, Commodicarbon, is a carbon certification programme encouraging more sustainable agricultural production where the farmer receives financial support for sequestering carbon. It is already available to farmers in the UK, Denmark and Romania and will be expanding to other geographies. Hummingbird Technologies will apply its sustainable agriculture detection tools to facilitate scalable and robust verification of the data reported by participating farmers.
Julie Fahler, Product Director & Co-founder of Commoditrader, said:
“This partnership is key for us and our programme quality. With the use of Hummingbird Technologies’ comprehensive detection and sensing tools we are able to verify each parameter of reported data and thus the quantified GHG reductions and removals – traced back to each field and hectare. This allows buyers of certificates to rest assured that the removals are true and reliable – and even traceable. We are very excited about the partnership and already have a great collaboration on even further developing the verification possibilities of regenerative practices.”
Matthew Guinness, Head of Sustainability at Hummingbird Technologies, said:
“We are really excited about this partnership and looking forward to a long and successful collaboration with Commoditrader. We are aligned in our vision that regenerative agriculture can play an important part in the fight against climate change whilst also generating additional benefits to water resources and biodiversity. By working with companies like Commoditrader our goal is to help build the incentive mechanisms to enable farmers to be rewarded for regenerative agriculture, and thereby facilitate widespread adoption.”
Thomas Gent, Founder of Gentle Farming, the operator of the Commodicarbon system in the UK, said:
“We are super excited to have Hummingbird Technologies working with us to bring credible carbon payment systems to UK farms. They bring a huge amount of technical ability and experience in rolling out scalable solutions. The future is very exciting for farmers on the ground today to be leaders in climate action and local biodiversity improvement through the implementation of regenerative agricultural principles.”
So what is regenerative agriculture?
Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming which is geared around the core principle of restoring soil. By adopting a set of key management practices, farmers can improve their soil fertility, function and resilience, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and reduce their reliance on fertilisers and pesticides.
This enables farmers to improve profitability since they can reduce costs without materially impacting yields, whilst simultaneously delivering public goods for water quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity.
Through carbon credit schemes or payments for ecosystem services farmers can be rewarded for these outcomes, thereby increasing their financial resilience further and incentivising greater adoption.