Why we're paying people to grow rice differently
Our first rice methane purchase, and why farmers are at the center of it.
Rice feeds more than half the world. It also produces around 10 to 12 percent of human-caused methane emissions globally. That’s not a reason to stop growing rice, but it is a reason to grow it differently.
This month, Terraset committed to purchasing 1,000 tons of methane abatement from AgriCapture, a company that pays rice farmers to change how they manage water in their fields in order to reduce methane emissions.
The standard approach is continuous flooding, where the fields stay underwater all season. This produces heat-trapping methane as bacteria break down organic matter in the standing water. It also burns through an enormous amount of groundwater in some of the most water-stressed regions of the United States.
The alternative is called alternate wetting and drying, or AWD. Instead of sitting underwater all season, fields get drained periodically, which gives the soil a chance to breathe. This approach reduces methane output from the field by up to 70 percent, uses dramatically less water, and produces the same yield of quality rice. Since 2021, AgriCapture’s farmers have saved 53 billion gallons of water and avoided methane emissions equivalent to more than 177,000 tons of CO₂ by switching from continuous flooding to AWD.
So why aren’t all rice farmers doing this already?
Because changing how you farm carries risk, and the financial reward for taking on that risk has to show up before the season starts, not after the harvest. AgriCapture shares credit revenue directly with farmers, which means every ton we buy translates into payments to the people actually doing the work in the field.
You can’t win the long game if you lose the short one first
Terraset started with durable carbon removal: pulling CO₂ out of the atmosphere and locking it away for centuries. That work is at the core of what we do. It’s chronically underfunded and has to happen eventually.
But carbon removal operates on a long clock. Methane doesn’t.
While CO₂ can stay in the atmosphere for centuries, methane breaks down after a decade or so. The catch is, it’s more potent: over a 20-year window, methane traps roughly 80 times more heat than CO₂. This means that we need to cut methane emissions today to avoid measurable warming within years, not generations. Durable carbon removal is how we stabilize the climate over centuries. Methane abatement is how we keep the next two decades from running away from us.
We added superpollutants to the Terraset portfolio because methane and refrigerants are warming the planet right now, and we have tools to stop it. Using them feels obvious.
The water beneath this purchase
The farms in AgriCapture’s US network sit on top of three of the most stressed groundwater systems in the country: the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer, the Texas Coastal Uplands Aquifer, and the Coastal Lowlands Aquifer that runs from Texas through Louisiana. In parts of Louisiana and Texas, farmers are already drilling deeper just to reach water. The water’s going out faster than rain and rivers can replace it.
Each credit from AgriCapture saves around 300,000 gallons of water. That water stays in aquifers that took thousands of years to fill.
That matters for how we think about this purchase. Reducing methane emissions is the headline. The water savings are the bonus that makes this purchase feel different.
We’ve been here before
AgriCapture is our first rice methane purchase, but it’s not the first methane work we’ve supported.
We’ve backed Tradewater, which destroys refrigerants and plugs abandoned oil and gas wells that have been venting superpollutants, sometimes for decades.
We’ve also supported StratX, which is building better landfill cover systems to capture methane that escapes across the surface, rather than from a single point. They’re at an early stage. We backed them because someone has to go first, and early purchases build the evidence base that brings everyone else in later.
Abandoned oil wells, landfill covers, rice farming. Different sources, different verification, same logic. We find a credible intervention, confirm the measurement, and show up early enough to matter.
The farmer signing up next season is who our dollars actually reach
If you want to be part of that, this is the most direct route.
If you’re thinking about how methane fits into a broader climate giving strategy, or if you work in water security or agricultural sustainability and want to understand how carbon credit revenue can fund farmer transitions, that conversation is worth having. Reach out to Taylor at taylor@terrasetclimate.org.