Groundwork BioAg issues first mycorrhizal soil carbon credits under Verra’s VM0042 in the US
Israeli bioagriculture company Groundwork BioAg has completed the first verified carbon credit issuance from its Rootella Carbon programme, issuing 19,568 Verified Carbon Units (net) under Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard, making it the first programme to issue credits under the VM0042 methodology in the United States.
The issuance, announced on 25 June 2026, was independently verified by SCS Global Services acting as a Verra-accredited validation and verification body. The company said multiple purchase agreements for the credits have already been signed. Verra CEO Mandy Rambharos said VM0042 was designed to bring rigorous, science-based accounting to agricultural land management — a sector with extensive carbon removal potential across US farmland that had, until now, seen minimal activity under the methodology.
The Rootella Carbon programme works by applying mycorrhizal fungi inoculants, sold commercially under the Rootella brand, to cropland. Mycorrhizal fungi aggregate soil particles to create stable, recalcitrant carbon-based molecules that the company says persist in the soil over extremely long timescales. The programme credits sequestration at a rate of 1.5 to 3.5 tCO₂e per acre annually and is marketed as delivering high-durability carbon dioxide removal at a cost Groundwork BioAg describes as a fraction of other engineered CDR approaches.
Enrolled farmer acreage has scaled substantially since the programme’s 2023 launch, growing from approximately 9,000 acres at inception to more than 700,000 acres of cropland across the US midwest and Canadian Prairies today. Groundwork BioAg CEO Alon Werber said the company intended to disrupt the global CDR market, which delivered a total of approximately 2 million tCO₂e in 2025, and that Rootella Carbon was on course to deliver one million tCO₂e in the next two years alone from its existing enrolled acreage.
The grower-centric model distributes up to 70% of net carbon credit sale proceeds directly to participating farmers, with Groundwork BioAg retaining the balance to fund programme operations, soil sampling, and third-party verification costs. The programme applies Verra’s VM0042 v2.0 Quantification Approach 2, known as Measure and Remeasure, which involves deploying stratified treated and control plots and collecting soil samples to quantify sequestration via dry combustion analysis.
The company identified an immediate addressable market of 450 million acres of reduced-tillage farmland across the Americas and said it was targeting commercial scale across this footprint. Groundwork BioAg previously announced a partnership with North American carbon credit developer and marketer Anew Climate to commercialise approximately 500,000 tCO₂e of Rootella Carbon credits within three years. Today’s issuance represents the first tranche of credits to reach the Verra Registry under that commercial trajectory.
