Offset Portfolio: Nori
About Nori
Location: Iowa, USA
Offset Type: Soil
Nori is a soil carbon credit marketplace that works with farmers to provide quantification and verification of transparent, blockchain-based carbon removals. When Ullrich Farms and other small to medium food and fibre producers sell carbon credits in Nori’s marketplace, they access additional revenue and incentives to continue and expand sustainable farming practices. Third-party verifications aren’t yet standard for soil carbon credits, so we do our own thorough research and consult third-party evaluations like those from Shopify.
Why Soil?
Soil is a large, natural carbon sink, holding three times the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. However, since inventing agriculture, people have reduced the carbon content of cultivated soils by 50-70%. When farmers use regenerative farming practices to store carbon from the atmosphere in the earth, they restore nature’s carbon cycle and boost soil health. Project Drawdown estimates that regenerative annual cropping can sequester between 15-22 gigatons of CO2e between 2020 and 2050.
Carbon Offset Evaluation
We picked Nori because of the transparency, enforceability, and access it provides to soil-based carbon removals. Nori’s projects have many co-benefits, including replenishing agricultural ecosystems and supporting farmer prosperity and well-being. Furthermore, Nori’s distributed model has the potential to catalyze future projects at scale by onboarding farmers to participate in carbon credit markets with a proprietary technology platform.
The Joro community is supporting projects that work with local communities in Iowa.
Read our full evaluation for more details →
Commons' Community Impact
The Joro community started supporting Nori in 2020. The first farmer the Joro community supported, Trey Hill, owner of Harborview Farms in Maryland, shared this note:
On the ground, your purchase of carbon credits is a tangible investment that provides my team at Harborview with the tools and technology we need to maintain the way we farm. The extra budget might buy extra seeds for a new, pollinator-friendly cover crop mix, plating attachments or other innovative equipment. And that practical support doesn’t go unnoticed. For other, more traditional farmers, it’s a real incentive to change their ways as well.
The Commons community has also supported Garrett Land and Cattle in Iowa, and is now supporting the farm of Adam and Levi Ullrich in Carroll County & Ida Country, Iowa. The Ullrich Family farm is adjacent to Garrett Land and Cattle, and decided to come online on the Nori Marketplace as a direct result of the demand from the Commons community and other buyers like us. This is a clear example of how early capital from the Commons community helped to create a demonstration effect for more supply of carbon credits to come online, a promising signal of additionality.
Commons' Offset Portfolio
Supporting carbon offsets can be a powerful way to invest in green technologies and protect natural ecosystems. But they aren’t a silver bullet – each project has a unique set of risks.
With the Commons Offset Portfolio, we do the work to maximize your impact. Just as you wouldn’t put all your money into one stock – we don’t put all your dollars into a single offset project.
