Metrics for Enabling Crop Nutrition Stewardship in North America.

The crop nutrition industry and supporting stakeholder organizations play a key role in increasing efforts to mitigate nutrient loss to air, water and the environment and improving practices to optimize fertilizer use. Collectively these efforts with farmers “enable” crop nutrition stewardship. Here, enabler metrics are defined as those representing processes key to nutrient stewardship outreach and education; in other words metrics reflecting resources the industry has put in place for grower needs and decision making. Documentation of priority metrics is a path towards achieving continuous improvement, and transparently reporting evaluated efforts enhances stakeholder confidence and trust. Enabling metrics have been identified relative to extension and crop nutrition professionals, infrastructure, research and innovation, and stakeholder engagement. This presentation will describe a potential set of metrics and examine recent efforts for crop nutrient stewardship in North America.