Keeping up with Climate Tech vol. 5
Rice isn’t just a staple food for billions—it’s the lifeblood of food security in many parts of the Global South. Yet, conventional rice farming is one of the world’s biggest water guzzlers and a significant emitter of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Mitti Labs, co-founded by Xavier Laguarta, HBS ‘23, Devdut Dalal, HBS ‘23, and Nate Torbick, is on a mission to transform rice farming by addressing water scarcity, climate change, and the economic challenges faced by smallholder farmers through digital monitoring technology.

Beginning with pilot projects on a few hundred hectares and gradually scaling up to over 30,000 hectares across states in diverse regions of India, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, and Tamil Nadu, the company demonstrates the scope for innovation and efficiency improvements that exist in rice farming.

The Challenge

Rice accounts for nearly half of the world’s caloric intake and is deeply woven into the cultural and economic fabric of many countries, including India, which is Mitti Labs’ area of focus. However, the traditional method of flooding rice fields consumes staggering amounts of water and contributes heavily to water stress.

“Rice farming consumes a third of all groundwater,” Mitti Labs co-founder Devdut Dalal told the Harvard Technology Review. “Whether that’s 3000 liters for every kg or 10 million liters for every hectare, the numbers are fairly astounding. And India is obviously one of the largest land masses dedicated to rice farming, with 25% of India’s farmland used for it.”

With methane responsible for roughly 12% of global emissions from rice cultivation and nearly 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere, its reduction is essential for mitigating short-term climate impacts. There is no methane removal technology available right now, so the only path is to reduce methane emissions in daily practices. 

“Across all of the sources of methane emission, obviously, oil and gas operations, landfills, and enteric fermentation causes very large stacks, but the only one that has a human component and has this net positive of water savings and farmer livelihood improvement, etc, is rice farming. So we chose this to tackle,” Dalal explained.

This was also personal to Dalal as it was an issue he could confront in his home country of India.

“We thought this was a powerful strategy to employ because I am Indian, and I want to put my best efforts into solving the water security issues, food security issues, [and] climate issues in my country,” he said. 

Mitti Labs’ Approach

Mitti Labs champions the adoption of alternative wetting and drying techniques, where a field is periodically flooded and then allowed to dry out, cycling between wet and dry periods. Doing so not only conserves water (roughly 5 to 6 million liters per hectare per season) but also reduces methane emissions by up to 3 tons per hectare compared to conventional methods. 

They work with double paddy fields — where rice is grown year-round, as opposed to being swapped out with wheat or other grains intermittently — to synergize costs. 

An important factor Dalal and Torbick had to consider is that traditional methods of field monitoring, reliant on human verification. 

“As soon as the rice starts shooting, even if you’re standing next to a rice field with a naked eye, you can’t tell if it’s wet or dry. And we want to understand how much water was used, and therefore how much methane was saved. So to understand that, you need radar data,” Dalal said.

Advanced remote sensing technologies, particularly synthetic aperture radar (SAR), overcome this limitation by using microwave signals that can penetrate cloud cover and the dense canopy of rice during monsoon seasons. By analyzing how these signals scatter off the rice shoots and underlying soil, the system can distinguish between flooded and dried-out conditions. This technology not only verifies water usage but also quantifies the methane savings.  

Technical and Operational Hurdles

Developing a reliable remote sensing platform was no small task. In India, the lack of pre-existing ground truth data on soil organic carbon or methane emissions meant that Mitti Labs had to pioneer field-level data collection. In setting up the platform, Dalal and his teams deployed measurement chambers directly in the fields to collect air samples and gauge methane emissions to calibrate satellite data. By comparing data from conventional flooded fields and those managed under AWD practices, they derive the “delta” — the quantifiable difference in emissions. They trained their monitoring framework to be applicable nationwide, gathering extensive ground truth data across India’s diverse rice growing zones, since “the soil type in Punjab, for example, is so different from what it is like in Tamil Nadu,” as Dalal explains. 

Using all this data, the company developed a Digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) system that uses technology to track and verify carbon emissions. This “secret sauce,” as Dalal calls it, integrates multiple radar bands, wavelengths, and spatial resolutions to deliver accurate assessments. Different frequency bands respond distinctly to moisture and vegetation characteristics, and varying polarizations help in differentiating between surface water, soil moisture, and plant structure. This helps estimate how long a field stays wet or dry, directly linking to the quantification of water savings and methane reductions.

This robust monitoring framework not only supports the verification needed for carbon credit monetization but also builds the trust necessary to attract further investment, which will be discussed later in this piece.

Building Trust at the Grassroots

Gaining the trust of smallholder farmers is pivotal to actually implementing Mitti Labs’ solution.

“We decided to go with the route of working with entities that already had the trust of farmers,” Dalal said. “Typically, that could be the buyer of the farmer’s produce, the supplier of their inputs, the local NGO, or the local agricultural university. When we surveyed farmers and asked, ‘Who do you trust the most out of these four agents?’ the latter two were the ones they trusted the most.”

By working with NGOs and agricultural universities organizations that have long been embedded within the communities and understand the farmers’ daily challenges, they get immediate credibility and are able to engage more authentically with farmers to understand the practical realities that drive their day-to-day behavior and incentivize them to leave behind age-old methods for efficiency. 

Dalal said this process helped them refine their pitch for adopting alternative wetting and drying (AWD). 

“The leading pitch is not around carbon finance,” he said. “We pitch this as a climate adaptation strategy: teaching farmers how to achieve the same, or arguably even better, grain output with less water.” 

This strategy resonates with farmers who are increasingly aware of the mounting costs of water scarcity.

“Ten years ago, there were five borewells in a given village. Now there are up to ten. Ten years ago, water was available at a shallower depth. Now, it’s much deeper, and if they’re drawing from a river, the number of hours they run their pumps has completely changed.” 

By framing the transition as a response to a very tangible problem—escalating water costs and diminishing water availability—Mitti Labs helps farmers see the immediate benefits of switching to AWD. Mitti Labs is framed as a pathway for these smallholders to adapt to changing environmental conditions while safeguarding their livelihoods. 

Financing the Transition Through Carbon Markets

Mitti Labs uses a system of carbon credits to finance their rice farming transition. 

As co-founder Devdut Dalal puts it, “it’s a piece of paper that you give to a meter somewhere and say, look, transfer money against this piece of paper.”

By quantifying the water savings and methane reductions achieved through alternative wetting and drying, they create verifiable carbon credits that can be traded on both voluntary and compliance carbon markets.

According to Dalal, the strategy isn’t just about the environmental benefits; it’s also a gateway to driving the growth of sustainable financing. He explains that companies with net-zero commitments, such as tech giants and industrial heavyweights, are actively seeking ways to offset residual emissions that cannot be done by internal measures.

“The largest buyers from the carbon markets today are tech companies — your Googles, your Microsofts, your Netflixes and Amazons — as well as oil and gas, aviation, mining, and steel companies,” Dalal noted. 

These sectors, driven by high energy usage and stringent sustainability targets, represent a significant pool of capital ready to invest in verified carbon credits. Moreover, compliance markets in regions like Japan, Singapore, and Europe add another layer of financial viability.

If a vendor wants to maintain their customers, they will have to be carbon neutral,” Dalal explains. “We have reliable, measurable, and transparent benefits, so it’s a smart investment.”

By turning environmental performance into a tradable asset, Mitti Labs not only secures the capital needed for scaling up their projects but also fosters a resilient ecosystem where sustainable practices are rewarded. This innovative model is key to accelerating the transition from traditional, water-intensive, and methane-heavy rice cultivation to a method that is more technology-forward, economically viable, and environmentally responsible.

Mitti Labs’ Outlook

Dalal believes Mitti Labs’ strength is its depth of engagement with rice farming.

“By sticking to one type of intervention, it bodes well for the accuracy of the remote sensing,” he said. “No other crop has such a high footprint. Wheat and barley and corn are not necessarily high-emitting crops. Sugarcane is probably the next ‘bad’ crop. With regard to water usage, stubble burning, and methane emissions, rice is the biggest culprit.”

While rice farming remains the primary focus, the potential for Mitti Labs’ expansion is vast. Countries across South and Southeast Asia (including Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia) share similar challenges in rice cultivation. By leveraging a technology that is finely tuned to the unique agronomic conditions of rice farming, Mitti Labs envisions replicating its model internationally — but first, they seek to tackle the millions of hectares across India they have not gotten to yet.