We first looked at soil organic carbon (SOC) credits in 2023 and walked away unconvinced. The farmer incentives weren’t there. The technical validation was unclear. Most importantly, it was anyone’s guess whether SOC credits would hold long-term value. Fast forward to early 2026, and things have begun to shift.
The Promise: An Economic and Environmental Win-Win Scenario
At its core, the SOC opportunity presents a potential perfect union between economic and environmental outcomes. Agriculture accounts for roughly 10–12% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but managed differently, farmland can flip from being a source of emissions to becoming a carbon sink. Farmers who adopt regenerative practices (cover crops, reduced tillage, improved rotations, etc.) can sequester meaningful quantities of carbon in the soil.
Here’s what makes it compelling as a market mechanism: there is a natural match waiting to be made. On one hand, companies around the world need credible, verifiable carbon offsets, whether motivated by climate commitments or regulatory obligations. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of farmers globally, many operating on thin margins, could benefit enormously from improved agronomic practices that also sequester carbon. If carbon markets can effectively intermediate between these two groups, the result is better economics for farmers, measurable global emissions reductions, and a functioning market for companies seeking to purchase offsets. In theory, this is exactly how global carbon markets are supposed to work, and the potential scale of impact is enormous.
The question is whether the infrastructure to make this matchmaking work reliably has finally arrived.
Three Conditions for Takeoff
Getting SOC markets to function at scale requires three realities to be true: low-cost measuring, reporting, and verifying (MRV), credible standards, and durable demand. Two of the three are now falling into place.
Reality 1: Low-Cost MRV — Check ✓
Historically, MRV for SOC was prohibitively expensive. Soil sampling is labor-intensive, results vary significantly across a single field, and the cost of rigorous verification ate into project economics, leaving little room for farmer payments.
That has changed dramatically with the convergence of AI and publicly available satellite data, which has driven MRV costs down by an order of magnitude. Projects that were economically unviable in 2022 now carry attractive gross margins. This isn’t incremental improvement; it’s a structural shift that has unlocked the supply side of the market.
Reality 2: Credibility — Check ✓
In October 2025, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) approved its first sustainable agriculture methodologies, granting its Core Carbon Principles (CCP) label to Verra’s VM0042 protocol and the Climate Action Reserve’s U.S. Soil Enrichment Protocol. For the first time, SOC credits earned a widely recognized stamp of quality.
This matters because credibility has been an Achilles’ heel of the broader voluntary carbon market. Buyers — particularly large corporates with significant reputational exposure — need to know that the credits they purchase represent real, measurable, and permanent reductions. The new certifications provide a baseline quality that the market has lacked. Early data bears this out: newer vintage credits certified under these protocols are commanding meaningful price premiums over earlier, uncertified equivalents.
To date, only a handful of SOC projects (all announced in 2025) have achieved full registration under the new protocols, but a substantial pipeline is building with over 150 projects in various stages of development and validation.
Reality 3: Demand Stability — Not Yet ✗
This is where the story gets more complicated and more instructive.
The voluntary carbon market as a whole has been roughly flat since 2021 at around 174 million credits retired per year. Supply is falling faster than demand, which sounds like good news for prices, but masks a deeper problem: the market remains thin, fickle, and heavily dependent on the discretionary commitments of a few large corporate buyers.
Compliance markets could offer a more durable foundation — by definition, they impose legal obligations rather than relying on voluntary actions. Today, 95 compliance carbon-pricing instruments exist globally, covering roughly 28% of global emissions. But very few explicitly allow soil organic carbon credits, and the political winds in some markets are blowing in the wrong direction.
Voters and companies in much of the developed world are pushing back against policies that raise costs in the name of lower emissions. Several established carbon pricing schemes are under political pressure. The optimistic view is that compliance markets are early and need time to mature; the pessimistic view is that they are fragile and may contract.
Singapore offers an early signal. As one of the first movers under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, which enables countries to trade emissions reductions internationally, Singapore has registered projects, including at least one soil carbon initiative. If other nations follow and open compliance markets to SOC credits, the demand equation shifts materially. But that remains a significant “if.”
A Platform Beyond Carbon Credits
One path through the demand uncertainty is a business model that doesn’t depend on it. The most interesting companies in this space are treating carbon credits as the initial wedge — a financial incentive that brings farmers onto a platform and supports better farming practices — with a focus on agronomic software and services that deliver value independent of credit sales.
The logic is sound. The profitability gap between average farming practices and best-in-class is significant. Crop planning tools, pest identification, rotation optimization, and precision input management have real value to farmers regardless of the value of a carbon credit on a given day. If a platform can use carbon as the hook and then monetize through tools that drive measurable yield improvements, the business becomes far less exposed to the volatility of voluntary markets.
This model doesn’t eliminate the dependency on carbon demand, but it changes the risk profile. Carbon credits become a customer acquisition mechanism rather than the entire revenue model.
What We’re Watching
The unit economics of SOC have improved dramatically. The technology to verify sequestration cheaply and credibly now exists. Quality standards are taking shape. These are genuine milestones. But we need to see the demand side evolve in one of two directions:
- Repeatable, durable compliance demand. The voluntary market will likely remain volatile. What changes the calculus will be compliance markets meaningfully accepting SOC, not one or two pioneering experiments, but a genuine wave of regulatory adoption that creates sustained, legally-obligated buyer demand. Singapore’s Article 6.2 work is worth monitoring closely as a leading indicator.
- Business models that transcend carbon. Platforms with proven agronomic software and services that generate revenue independent of credit sales. If carbon is the wedge but farm productivity tools are the business, the exposure to fickle voluntary markets diminishes significantly.
Soil organic carbon credits in 2023 were too early. The supply-side infrastructure in 2026 is genuinely impressive. But the demand side remains the open question — and that question, at its root, is the same one facing the entire carbon market: can we build mechanisms durable enough to sustain long-term investment in climate solutions, or will the commitment to pay for emissions reductions continue to wax and wane with political and corporate winds?
Why Soil Organic Carbon Credits Are Worth Watching — and What Still Needs to Play Out was originally published in G2 Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.