Interview Series: Simon Haldrup

This week’s read time: 5 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our weekly feature showcasing conversations with the industry’s leading voices - CSOs, sustainability directors, and other senior professionals shaping the sustainability landscape. Each edition dives into their professional journeys, hands-on insights, and outlook on the challenges and opportunities defining corporate sustainability.

These interviews are designed to be quick, insightful reads, offering you actionable takeaways and a personal glimpse into the people leading the way. Stay tuned for stories, strategies, and lessons that matter to you.

PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Simon Haldrup

Co-founder & CEO at Agreena

Simon Haldrup is the CEO of Agreena, the European soil carbon leader building the digital infrastructure behind resilient farming and verified climate outcomes that businesses can rely on at scale.

Simon received his M.S. from the Technical University of Denmark in Engineering and Robotics before attending IMD and MIT Sloan School of Management. As a digitally-minded business leader, Simon has amassed 15 years of transformation experience within the banking industry working at Danske Bank. With his commercial and strategic mindset, and talent for pioneering business model innovation, Simon co-founded Agreena in 2018. Today, its soil carbon programme, AgreenaCarbon, is Europe’s first large-scale, and the world’s largest, regenerative agriculture project to have issued credits under Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard. Agreena supports more than 2,500 farmers’ regenerative transition over around five million hectares of farmland in 20 countries, from the UK to Ukraine, ensuring high-integrity outcomes for farmers, decarbonising companies and climate.

What does regenerative agriculture actually change on the ground, and why is soil carbon central to that shift?

Regenerative agriculture changes everything! It’s a holistic approach, consisting of farming practices that restore soil health and increase carbon storage. For example, planting cover crops between harvests helps protect and enrich the soil, minimising soil disturbance prevents the release of stored carbon, and leaving crop residues on the field or applying organic mulch protects the soil, conserves moisture, and boosts carbon retention. All of these things combine not only to have verifiable climate impact, but also to improve the long-term resilience of our food system.

As some of the first people to feel the impacts of climate change, it’s a movement that we’re seeing a lot of farmers support - but even though they understand the urgency to adopt these practices, it’s still a huge decision. Transitioning to regenerative agriculture means changing the way that they’ve done their job for their whole life. Soil carbon enables the regenerative transition to be financed, helping farmers cover any initial yield drops while their soils recover from years of intensive farming, contributing to new, less invasive equipment for planting or harvesting, and supporting their long-term resilience as a business too.

Soil carbon credits have moved from a niche concept to considerable corporate interest in just a few years. What has changed in the market to make this investable at scale?

There are a number of factors at play here - in my mind, it’s a convergence of corporate awakening, tech maturity, and the urgency to finance farmers’ transitions.

First, corporate ambition within the voluntary carbon market (VCM) is evolving. Companies are beginning to go beyond net-zero pledges and actively purchase high-integrity credits to neutralise residual emissions. They are realising that agricultural land presents one of the planet’s most scalable carbon sinks.

Second, tech infrastructure has finally caught up with market demand. Historically, soil carbon was way too complex to measure accurately. Now, advanced MRV - measurement, reporting, and verification - like ours can provide the reliable, reportable data that institutional investors and corporate buyers in the VCM require.

The last thing is the growing recognition that high-quality carbon credits are an essential tool for transition finance. The transition to regenerative agriculture is not immune from financial risk. When it works, the VCM is a way to provide the finance needed to cover the transition period, turning climate impact into a globally investable asset class.

There’s increasing scrutiny on voluntary carbon markets - additionality, permanence, verification. Where do carbon credits face the toughest credibility test today, and what would need to change to strengthen trust?

Let me start by saying that this scrutiny is something I welcome. We need the VCM to remain a robust, high-integrity, trustworthy market; we need to ask - and be asked - tough questions. In terms of Agreena, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve satisfied the verification piece. Like you mention, permanence and additionality are the questions that I still see - rightly - come up again and again from sceptics, but it’s crucial to recognise that the fundamental shifts needed to strengthen trust have largely already happened.

The first area is standardisation. We have matured through intense rigour, uniting behind internationally recognised third-party methodologies like Verra’s VM0042 and aligning with high-integrity benchmarks like the ICVCM and its Core Carbon Principles (CCPs).

Second, to mitigate reversal risks, leading programmes like ours already employ systemic buffers with conservative accounting and comprehensive pools to immediately cover any released carbon.

Radical transparency is the final piece. While the VCM is continuing to evolve, the foundation of openness and high integrity must remain at the heart of our work, welcoming scrutiny not as an attack but an opportunity to further build a trustworthy market.

For readers less familiar with Agreena, what exactly do you do across the regenerative value chain, and how do you connect farmers, corporates, and carbon markets in practice?

In a nutshell, Agreena builds the digital infrastructure that makes agricultural resilience measurable, reliable, and scalable - for farmers and for businesses.

We work directly with farmers across Europe, providing the tools, insights, and economic incentives needed to improve soil health, stabilise yields, and strengthen long-term farm viability through regenerative agricultural practices, without upfront cost or loss of control. The changes that occur through this transition are measured at field level through digital MRV, combining satellite data, soil sampling, and farmer-reported information. We take responsibility from field-level change through to verified outcomes, where the climate impact is independently verified.

The outcome here is auditable results that are aligned to corporate needs: we’ve issued more than two million soil carbon credits via the AgreenaCarbon Project, under Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VM0042). Farmers can choose to keep their credits, sell them privately, or have Agreena find buyers - and they get 85% of the value when we sell credits on their behalf.

When soil carbon credits are included in a corporate decarbonisation strategy, what separates programmes that genuinely contribute to measurable emissions reduction from those that are symbolic?

The short answer is the combination of advanced MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) technology and deep scientific rigour. As the engine behind everything we do, our market-leading tech is frankly incredible, but it is the connection of this technology with robust science that enables us to scale with total confidence in the carbon outcomes we’re generating. The Verra verification seal of approval gives buyers that same total confidence we’ve had all along.

So yes, AgreenaCarbon credits are verified to be of the highest quality, but I don’t think that a symbolic element is an inherently bad thing to consider too, once the fact of measurable climate impact has been established. In fact, it’s another factor that sets us apart in the nature-based solutions category - you can go beyond carbon and see the co-benefits: improved soil structure minimises the effects of drought and floods, biodiversity flourishes with the addition of cover crops and residue management, and roughly 85% of the finance generated from the credits supports the farmer to continue their transition. I could go on, but you get the picture - an AgreenaCarbon credit genuinely represents measurable emissions reductions and removals, as well as a host of social, economic and environmental co-benefits.

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