In the largest rice methane offtake to date, Mitti Labs will deliver one million high-integrity credits to Google by 2030
BENGALURU, India and SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Deep-tech company Mitti Labs today announced a major five-year carbon credit agreement with Google to scale climate-smart agriculture across 100,000 hectares of smallholder rice farms in India. The announcement follows Mitti Labs’ recent funding round showing an increase in momentum for using agriculture as a climate solution.
By transitioning over 70,000 farmers to water and methane-savings irrigation practices, this partnership aims to eliminate 3M tons of near-term warming impact (GWP20, equivalent to 1M tons of GWP100 impact) while conserving billions of gallons of water across critical regional basins.
Methane is a ‘superpollutant’, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas that is human-caused and responsible for roughly one third of climate warming to date. Because methane breaks down in the atmosphere in a decade, cutting its emissions today is a direct path to reducing acute near-term warming.
“Google is committed to finding the most promising solutions that neutralize warming across both the near and long term. Mitti Labs’ approach delivers critical near-term atmospheric impact by cutting methane emissions, while conserving billions of gallons of water and empowering smallholder farmers to deploy advanced water-management practices. We’re excited to partner with them to help accelerate and scale their solution across India,” said Kate Brandt, Chief Sustainability Officer at Google.
Rice paddies, continuously flooded under traditional farming practices, are among the largest human-induced sources of methane, accounting for more than 10% of global methane emissions. Mitti Labs has pioneered a model that combines deep engagement in farming communities with the most advanced satellite radar technology to drive a low-cost, science-backed, and rapidly scalable shift to alternate irrigation practices. This shift cuts up to 50% of methane emissions from rice fields and reduces irrigation volumes by close to 40% while maintaining rice yields.
In addition to large-scale methane reduction, the partnership is projected to deliver billions in liters of water savings across the country — the equivalent of Bengaluru’s annual supply for three years — and establish a new standard in leveraging satellite technology towards water-efficient rice farming practices.
Mitti Labs’ GeoAI platform, developed with support from NASA, fuses high-resolution satellite radar data with field-collected ground truth to generate field-level insights on crop health, soil moisture, and flooding at the resolution of individual smallholder plots.
