Environmental outcomes are defined by Regenerate Outcomes as positive enhancements to soil organic carbon (in mineral soils), peatland condition, biodiversity, and water quality which can be monetised through monitoring, reporting, and verification.

Whether and how these outcomes are monitored is subject to the location and specific management context of the farm.

Verra, established in 2005, is a non-profit organisation which administers the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) for certifying carbon emissions reductions. Verra is recognised for its good governance by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) and ICROA (a quality assurance provider for carbon trading). Verra has issued over one billion carbon credits.

High standard carbon credits are only generated when the carbon being sequestered is additional to a business-as-usual farm management scenario. Regenerate Outcomes’ unique mentoring and outcomes programme evidences the additionality required to trade high standard carbon credits.

You’ll be awarded the majority share of any environmental outcome produced by the programme, subject to a minimum carbon value per hectare.

The programme retains a share of proceeds to cover the up-front and ongoing costs of providing all services to farms without up-front charge.

You can request whether your share is distributed in the form of cash payment or units.

It is not possible to trade high value carbon credits without having a laboratory-measured soil carbon baseline in place.

If you adopt beneficial management practices and increase your soil carbon without any measured baseline in place, you won’t be able to sell this carbon now or in the future. A soil carbon baseline is expensive and technically challenging. We ensure that baselining is carried out to a scientifically accredited standard.

The Understanding Ag mentoring programme helps you better understand how to increase and manage soil carbon stocks to benefit your core business and improve underlying profit margins.

The programme is designed to help you improve fundamental productivity while monitoring, verifying, and selling any increases in soil carbon at the same time.

We only sell carbon credits to companies which are evidencing auditable emissions reductions and clearly stating their future commitment to sustainability targets.

It is in the interests of both Regenerate Outcomes and farmers to sell to buyers which are committed to broader sustainability targets at the optimum price and time.

By bulk selling the carbon credits and other environmental outcomes produced by a farm cluster, we aim to open the tender to buyers who may be averse to buying from single farms, thereby potentially entering a higher price band.

We recognise that you may have to leave the programme for any number of reasons.

If you leave early, the programme will retain any proceeds related to environmental outcomes which have not yet been verified and sold, i.e. which are in the process of being generated. This is so that the programme recovers some of the costs of providing services to your farm in prior years.

We will never recoup any revenue which has already been paid to you.

We are focussed on keeping programme paperwork as light as possible while also complying with the monitoring, reporting and verification requirements of the Verified Carbon Standard.

In the first year of the programme there is information that we need to gather to baseline the farm’s management and carbon stocks. Once the programme is underway, we require you to complete the Annual Logbook describing farm management per field. This information is all key to generating soil carbon credits.

We may also ask for other information during the course of the programme as environmental markets evolve.

Agricultural subsidies do not currently negate or undermine the generation of independently verified carbon credits by a farm.

Your subsidy listings may be required by the Validation and Verification Body (VVB) to ensure the programme is providing sufficient ‘additionality’.

Verra recognise that subsidies do not fully compensate for the barriers and risks associated with converting a farm from intensive agriculture towards regenerative production.

You do not have to enter the entire farmed area at the start of the programme. However, in view of the costs of delivering the programme, it is our decision whether or not to onboard a smaller block of land instead of the entire farm.

Each year that land is excluded from the programme and not baselined is a year ‘lost’ in terms of potential carbon credit or other environmental outcome revenue.

The mentoring system is also very much catered to deploying regenerative practices across the farm as a functional whole system, not as a collection of individual parcels of land.