Swiss agricultural carbon company Cotierra has delivered its first 1,200 tCO₂e of soil carbon removal credits to myclimate, the Zurich-based climate project foundation, and extended the offtake partnership into 2027. The delivery, drawn from Cotierra’s 2025 production year, is one of the first sizeable tranches of agricultural soil carbon removals to actually land in a buyer’s account rather than sit as a forward contract.
Why it matters
Agricultural soil carbon has a credibility problem. The category has been dogged by questions about permanence, measurement accuracy, and whether claimed removals are additional to what farmers would have done anyway. Actual verified delivery, not promises, is what the segment needs to rebuild trust with corporate buyers. A 1,200-tonne delivery is modest next to what engineered removal players ship, but in soil carbon it counts as a real-world receipt. The 2027 extension signals myclimate is willing to commit to a multi-year pipeline from this supplier rather than treating it as a one-off pilot.
The details
Cotierra CEO Thomas Käslin announced the delivery on LinkedIn, describing it as the company’s first large-scale volume of carbon removal credits delivered to myclimate. The 1,200 tCO₂e comes from Cotierra’s 2025 production. The extended offtake runs into 2027, with an additional volume agreed on top of the initial delivery. Exact tonnage for the extension was not disclosed. Käslin framed the credits as “fully traceable” with co-benefits beyond the carbon itself: farmer income, soil health improvements, and supply chain resilience. That framing matters because myclimate, as a buyer, markets project portfolios to corporate clients who increasingly want traceability down to the farm level and documented co-benefits to justify premium prices. Cotierra team members tagged in the announcement included Ksenia Delannoy-Raspopina, Roman Hüppi, and Angela Zimmermann. The company has 5,251 followers on LinkedIn, placing it in the small-but-active category of European agricultural CDR startups. The announcement did not specify the farming practices behind the credits, the geographies involved, the measurement, reporting and verification (MRV, meaning how the carbon is measured and checked by third parties) methodology used, or the registry the credits are issued under. It also did not disclose price per tonne.
Implications
For myclimate, the delivery locks in supply through 2027 at a time when corporate buyers in Switzerland and Germany face rising pressure to retire removal credits rather than avoidance credits. Soil carbon, if the integrity holds up, gives buyers a nature-based removal option with faster generation times than afforestation. For Cotierra, delivering actual tonnes is the hard currency that turns a startup into a supplier. Most agricultural soil carbon projects spend years in project design, baseline measurement, and practice rollout before any credits issue. Hitting a 1,200-tonne milestone and winning a repeat offtake is the validation moment that tends to unlock the next round of buyer conversations. The wider signal for agricultural CDR: buyers who have been skeptical of soil carbon may be willing to re-engage if suppliers can show delivery discipline and traceability. The segment has been stuck between engineered removals on one side, which buyers trust but find expensive, and older nature-based credits on the other, which buyers distrust after a run of quality scandals. The next question is price disclosure and methodology transparency. If Cotierra and similar suppliers want to pull buyers back into agricultural soil carbon at scale, publishing the MRV protocol, the registry, and ideally a price range would do more for category credibility than another milestone post.
Caveats
The announcement is a company LinkedIn post, not an independent verification statement. We do not know from the source which registry issued the credits, which protocol governed the measurement, or which farms contributed the tonnage. The permanence claim attached to agricultural soil carbon is also inherently weaker than mineralization or geological storage, because soil carbon can be lost through tillage, drought, or land-use change in subsequent years. 1,200 tonnes is a small volume in absolute terms. A single mid-sized DAC plant targets tens of thousands of tonnes per year. Agricultural soil carbon’s promise has always been scale through many farms, not depth at any one site, so judging this category on volume alone is premature, but so is declaring it solved. Soil carbon removals, like all CDR, are justified only for residual emissions that cannot be cut at source. A corporate buyer retiring Cotierra credits should be doing so on top of an aggressive decarbonization plan, not instead of one. That caveat applies to every tonne myclimate sells downstream, regardless of who supplied it. Watch for the methodology disclosure, the 2027 volume number, and whether any third-party verifier publishes a validation report tied to this specific delivery.
Source: linkedin.com