Mitti Labs, a New York-based climate-tech startup, is pioneering a high-impact strategy to curb methane emissions from rice farming by combining remote sensing and AI. Leveraging satellite and radar data, their AI-powered models monitor field-level activities and environmental changes even beneath clouds or soil enabling cost-effective methane verification that traditional on-site sensors can't match. In India, Mitti collaborates closely with The Nature Conservancy through the PRANA initiative Promoting Regenerative, No-Burn Agriculture to guide farmers toward climate-smart practices across Punjab and beyond.

By the end of 2025, the PRANA-Mitti partnership expects to engage over 650,000 farmers across more than 6,200 villages, conducting upwards of 21,000 training sessions a massive scale-up of sustainable agriculture outreach. Their “soil-to-sky” digital monitoring–reporting–verification (dMRV) platform now covers 10 million hectares, or approximately 25% of India’s rice cultivation area, creating a digital twin for precision insights.

As a potent contributor to global warming rice paddies emit about 12% of anthropogenic methane, a gas up to 85 times more powerful than CO₂ this approach offers both environmental and financial rewards. Farmers benefit from enhanced yields and income, often via carbon credit revenues, while climate-friendly cultivation methods reshape rice farming into a solution, not a pollutant.