Today’s Solutions: December 19, 2025

If farmers make changes to the way they manage soil on farms—and that happened on farmland globally—it could theoretically suck a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, or as much as humans have emitted since the Industrial Revolution. The changes aren’t particularly complicated, and involve things like rotating crops, planting cover crops, and avoiding tilling the soil. The problem is modern agriculture demands more food at higher speeds, and since farmers aren’t getting paid fairly, they don’t have much of an incentive to grow crops sustainably.

That’s where Indigo comes in, a new marketplace that is trying to incentivize farmers by connecting them with companies and others who want to pay for carbon offsets. Like new technology designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, work on farms can help tackle the problem of CO2 already in the atmosphere. But while carbon-sucking machines can cost $100 per ton of sequestered CO2, changes on a farm can happen much more affordably.

Farmers can sign into the marketplace and receive up to $20 per ton of carbon they sequester per year, which could motivate farmers to change their practices considering each acre can sequester two to three tons of carbon a year. That payment could potentially double the salaries of farmers who are struggling to make ends meet. There are many challenges that will come with making this carbon-offsetting marketplace go mainstream, but if it does work, it could have a huge effect on emissions.

Solutions News Source Print this article
More of Today's Solutions

New method uses sound waves to map soil health, stop famine, and restore farm...

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Across the world, soil scientists are trading in their shovels for something unexpected: seismic sensors. In a breakthrough ...

Read More

This simple 15-minute mindset exercise can ease anxiety, science shows

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A growing body of research is revealing how a short, simple activity that is done in just 15 ...

Read More

3 habits of the happiest people

Think of the happiest people you know. Do you find yourself often wondering what they are doing to maintain a general level of joy? ...

Read More

Changemakers of the week: GRuB and SparkNJ

Every day on the Optimist Daily, we report on solutions from around the world. Though we love solutions big and small, the ones that ...

Read More