What 340 smallholder farmers taught us about MRV design
Our first Kelantan deployment assumed reliable mains power and a technician on site. Neither existed. The redesign took four months and made the system better everywhere else too.
What we learn instrumenting sites, arguing with methodologies, and watching a market slowly learn to ask better questions.
Featured
Mass balance is a reasonable first approximation for biochar carbon content. It's also wrong by 8–14% on roughly a third of the sites we've instrumented — always in the same direction. Here's what we found when we paired it with lab assay, and why we now require both.
Showing all 6
From the field
Our first Kelantan deployment assumed reliable mains power and a technician on site. Neither existed. The redesign took four months and made the system better everywhere else too.
Market
Durable removal below $90/tonne almost always means someone is absorbing a cost they haven't priced — usually the project developer, sometimes the community hosting the site.
Policy
Most commentary treats the Carbon Removal Certification Framework as a compliance burden. Read it as a technical specification instead and it tells you exactly what to build.
Methodology
Soil cores are the standard for verifying rock weathering. They're also spatially sparse enough that two honest verifiers can produce numbers 20% apart on the same field.
Market
We logged every question from 45 buyer diligence processes. The pattern is clear, and it is not the one most project developers prepare for.
From the field
Quarterly drone surveys of a single Sabah restoration site, from bare concession to closing canopy. The growth curve does not look like the model predicted.
No posts in this category yet. Try another filter.
Go deeper
Everything we publish — including the raw methodology documents behind every credit we issue.