Salesforce to Buy 500,000 Carbon Credits From Indian Rice Methane Projects

A corporate buyer backs rice methane cuts

Salesforce has agreed to buy 500,000 carbon credits from Mitti Labs over five years. The credits will come from projects working with tens of thousands of smallholder farmers in India to reduce methane from rice cultivation while conserving water. The agreement links a corporate buyer’s climate commitments to changes in how farms manage their fields, a practical test of whether credit demand can help make those changes more widespread.

Rice is a difficult source of emissions to address because the water practices that support cultivation can also create conditions for methane. The proposed credits therefore depend on more than a buyer’s promise: the projects need to change farming practices, and the reductions need to be measured well enough to support the claims attached to each credit. This is more significant than it looks. The purchase gives Salesforce a role in funding a specific agricultural intervention, while placing pressure on the project’s monitoring to show what the money achieves.

The agreement also fits Salesforce’s broader work on short-lived, heat-trapping pollutants. Earlier this year, the company joined Amazon, Autodesk, Figma, Google, JPMorganChase and Workday to launch the Superpollutant Action Initiative, which aims to direct $100 million toward reducing these emissions. That initiative frames the rice deal as part of a wider effort to address pollutants whose climate effects can be powerful even when they remain in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide.

Changing how rice fields are watered

Flooded rice fields are a major source of agricultural methane. Rice cultivation contributes about 12% of global methane emissions, second among agricultural sources only to livestock. When fields stay flooded, conditions in the soil favor methane production; managing water differently can interrupt that process. The challenge is to cut flooding without undermining the crop or placing an unworkable burden on farmers.

Mitti Labs’ projects use alternate wetting and drying (AWD), which lets fields dry periodically during the growing season instead of keeping them continuously flooded. It’s a change in routine as much as a technical intervention: farmers need to manage water levels over the crop cycle, and project teams need to establish that the new practices are being used. If you’re working in this space, the practical question is whether those requirements can be sustained across many farms, not simply demonstrated in a small number of fields.

According to the source, AWD can cut methane emissions by up to 50% and water use by up to 40%, without reducing crop yields. Those figures describe potential reductions, not a guarantee that every participating farm will reach the same result. The distinction matters for credits, whose value depends on evidence that the claimed emissions cuts are tied to the farming practices in question.

The expected water savings from the Salesforce-backed projects total 700 billion liters—roughly 18 months of Bengaluru’s annual water supply. In places where farms, cities and industry draw on the same groundwater, using less water for cultivation could ease pressure on a shared resource. And yet, the comparison is a way to make the volume understandable; it doesn’t show how savings will be distributed among communities or how water availability will change in any particular area.

Methane is among the superpollutants identified by the IPCC as a significant driver of warming. These gases account for almost half of warming to date, the source reports. Many persist in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, but can trap heat tens to thousands of times more powerfully. That combination makes methane reductions relevant to near-term climate efforts, while leaving the long-term need to address carbon dioxide in place.

Data behind the credits

Founded in 2023, Mitti Labs combines artificial intelligence, satellite technology and field operations to track changes in rice farming. Its GeoAI platform, developed with support from NASA, uses satellite radar imagery and field data to monitor flooding, soil moisture and crop health. The approach pairs remote observations with information gathered on the ground, giving the project more than one way to assess what is happening across participating fields.

Monitoring is central to the deal’s credibility. Satellite data can help track field conditions over broad areas, while field operations can supply context that imagery alone may not capture. Neither method, by itself, resolves every question about how much methane was avoided. The system is intended to provide evidence for the emissions reductions tied to the credits, so the quality and interpretation of that evidence will shape how confidently buyers and observers can assess the results.

(And this is the part most people overlook.) A platform can document changes in water and crop conditions, but the case for a credit still rests on connecting those observations to an emissions reduction. That’s where clear methods and consistent records matter. The article describes the monitoring tools and the intended role of the data, but doesn’t provide project-level results from the Salesforce-backed farms.

Salesforce’s Jamila Yamani, director of Climate & Energy, said the company sees rice methane reduction as a scalable way to slow near-term warming while preserving water resources. Mitti Labs co-founder Xavier Laguarta said buyers increasingly want to observe a project’s impact directly, and described the agreement as a way to bring the practices to more farmers. Their comments point to two linked priorities: expanding adoption and making results visible to the organizations paying for credits.

What the agreement could signal

Mitti Labs plans to issue 2 million credits annually by 2028 from projects in India and Southeast Asia. That planned volume gives the Salesforce purchase a place within a larger expansion, though the article doesn’t say how much of the future supply will come from any one location or farming program. Growth will depend on enrolling farmers, maintaining the practices and producing evidence that supports the credits.

The Salesforce purchase follows the company’s September 2026 agreement with Google to buy 1 million credits over four years, then Google’s largest superpollutant credit deal. Together, the agreements suggest that large corporate buyers are beginning to commit to credits tied to methane reductions, giving projects a potential source of funding as they work to reach more farms. A purchase agreement can help create demand, but it can’t by itself establish the quality of the reductions.

For readers assessing the deal, the key questions are concrete: whether farmers continue using AWD, whether water savings hold up across project areas, and whether monitoring can substantiate the emissions claims. The figures in the announcement describe an ambitious case for the approach. The project’s longer-term significance will depend on what its data shows as participation grows.

A sizeable commitment. The proof comes from the fields.