Who is AgriCapture, and What are They Doing for Rice?

AgriCapture, a Nashville, Tennessee-based carbon credit company established in 2021, is taking the rice industry by storm. Read the following Q&A with president Tyler Hull to find out more about the company and its goals for rice.
Q:
How did AgriCapture come about?
A: “There’s a farmland investment company here in Nashville called Land Fund Partners. I was at Land Fund Partners back in 2020, and in September of 2020, protocols came out to generate carbon credits in agriculture. I started doing a deep dive to try and understand how these protocols worked and learning what practices farmers can do. We started meeting with a lot of the different companies in the space that were doing carbon or looking at doing ag carbon and didn’t feel like the right fit was out there — we didn’t feel like they really understood farmers, so we didn’t feel like they understood the economics. We thought, ‘We know farmers and we have good relationships with farmers, so we’ll set up our own company to do this ourselves.’ So, AgriCapture spun out of Land Fund Partners in 2021, and now they’re two totally separate entities.
“We started with focusing on corn, cotton, and beans. We realized quickly that it’s really hard for the juice to be worth the squeeze in soil carbon, so we pivoted to rice because the opportunity to reduce methane emissions was so significant (carbon credits are issued in tons of CO2 equivalent, and methane is 28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon). Reducing one ton of methane is the same as sequestering 28 tons of carbon, so the unit economics were much more attractive in the rice space because you can generate more credits per acre as you’re reducing methane emissions. That’s how rice became our crop of focus.”
Q:
Who all is involved with AgriCapture?
A: “We have 20 employees. Most are here in Nashville. This is all of our technology staff, so we have data engineers and GIS specialists, a remote-sensing team, and our marketing and communications team here. Then we have a second office in Little Rock, Arkansas, that’s our more farmer-facing team. As we grew our acreage and number of farmers we worked with, we hired a rice programs manager and agronomists for that location. When we got more integrated with the supply chain tracking post-harvest storage and segregation and identity preservation through the milling process, we needed a little bit more boots-on-the-ground presence in the Delta.”
Q:
Where do you see AgriCapture going in the short-term and long-term?
A: “In the next one to five years, we want to build the market for sustainable rice. Rice is a fascinating crop where the same practices can reduce water by 30%+, which also reduce methane emissions by 60%+, which also reduce the uptake of arsenic in the grain by 40%+. I don’t want to call it the silver bullet, but it’s a huge opportunity that we can grow rice this way, feed a growing population, and it’s healthier for the consumer and better for the environment. We hope to make identity-preserved rice that’s grown this way an industry standard here in the U.S., so when you’re buying rice from the grocery store or any domestic provider, you know where it’s sourced from and how it’s grown.
“Beyond that, we understand that rice is a commodity, and there’s going to be a lot of rice that will be exported with low cost often being the driver. That’s where we want to be able to provide a financial incentive to all these growers through carbon credits. At the end of the day, there’s only so many consumers who are buying rice off the shelf, but we want to incentivize farmers. We want it to be a true financial incentive; we don’t want to require farmers to adopt practices that aren’t economical for their operation, but we want to be able to provide a signal that says ‘If you are willing to do this, this is what it can mean in terms of dollars per acre.’
“We’re on north of 50,000 acres this year but would love to be on hundreds of thousands of acres in the coming years and maybe do some pilot projects internationally in other rice-growing areas. We’ll also probably continue to build out our team in Arkansas just because it’s a very relational industry, and we get that.”
Q:
How is AgriCapture reaching out to people?
A: “It’s a lot of miles on the tires — we go to Rice Outlook and field days. We get a lot of interest from farmers just through word of mouth. We haven’t had the approach of ‘let’s go sign up a million acres right out of the gate.’ It’s more of ‘let’s get it working with farmers and get them paid.’ The cool thing about doing it that way is it works, and you get a lot of farmer referrals that happen pretty organically.”
Q:
How far does your territory expand as of now?
A: “We’re currently in five of the six rice-growing states — Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri — with the plan to be in California in 2025. What’s exciting is we’ve set up our system to be able to address any rice-growing region and also understand the nuances of a Delta rice production system versus Texas versus California versus Louisiana. We’ve said we want to be able to provide this to farmers across the country, so we’re going to have to get our feet wet in each state. We’ve been very intentional about picking up acres in each state with different geographies for that reason.
“It’s crazy because rice is the largest greenhouse gas-emitting crop in the world, but U.S. rice farmers had not been able to participate in the U.S. carbon market until recently. We have a carbon market developing and all these financial services, oil and gas, and tech companies looking to offset their emissions, and one of the most significant areas we can do that in is the rice industry and drive that revenue and those dollars to U.S. rice farmers. Because rice is a complex crop, quantifying those emissions and having the data to prove it, dealing with water and flooding and the absence of flooding, makes it all a complex and niche system that got left behind in the carbon market to some degree. So for us, that just seemed like opportunity, so it’s exciting to develop this but also bring it to all the rice-growing states.”
Q:
What kind of tools does AgriCapture use to measure all these data points?
A:“It always starts with farm maps. We get farm maps in a variety of forms from farmers, then we load it into a geospatial database here in Nashville. We use Google Earth engine and a couple other satellite data providers to track flooding or absence of flooding on the field, crop rotations, and whether we detect if it was burned, incorporated, or winter flooded. Then we have third-party soil sampling providers who will test for clay content and test for soil carbon. We kind of have a combination of remote sensing from our GIS team using satellite data and this element of direct data capture from maps, soil tests, yield data, etc. We tried to think, ‘what can we get without bothering the farmer? Let’s start there and get a map to see everything we can see from satellite’ and then ‘what can’t we see or what do we need to have that we have to go to the farmer with?’”

Q:
Do you have certain requirements for working with a grower or their operation?
A:
“We always work with farmers who are introducing some level of aeration to their soil. That’s typically farmers who are doing alternate wetting and drying or furrow irrigation. Those two practices are the two most common practices reducing water and methane emissions, so that’s kind of our primary requirement. We don’t have an acreage minimum or anything like that.”
Q:
Is there anything else readers should know about AgriCapture?
A:
“Something really cool came about recently when we were issued 37,000 carbon credits. In order to generate those 37,000 carbon credits, we saved nine billion gallons of water. What we’re seeing is more companies really caring about the water savings. In the same way companies have carbon or climate goals by 2030, they’re also setting water goals. There are lots of places you could get a carbon credit, but to drive meaningful water savings, there are few places where you can have the level of impact that you can have in the rice sector. We’re seeing rice farmers are well positioned to be on the leading edge of the burgeoning water market, so it’s cool to see how we can make U.S. ag and specifically U.S. rice farmers a recipient of the flow of those dollars.”