Achieving Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Commodity Crop Production: A Supply Chain Approach to Measuring, Reporting and Verification.

Companies and organizations throughout the commodity crop supply chain in the US have been developing and implementing goals and programs to improve the environmental sustainability of food and fiber products. Many of these goals explicitly target greenhouse gas emissions and soil quality improvements as key objectives for ensuring a sustainable source of key ingredients.  One tool designed specifically for use in supply chain programs and increasingly being applied across commodity crop land in the US is the Fieldprint Calculator (FPC), a web based tool which provides results for seven key sustainability metrics - including greenhouse gas emissions and soil carbon - from individual fields based on farmer data inputs.

This system has been applied on over 2.5 million acres of land in the 2015 season, with substantial growth anticipated. Anticipating this increased application, improvements to the scientific tools used for the metrics and technology platform are underway, as is development of a protocol for reporting on results at the scale of a region, or “supply-shed”. This presentation will present examples of how current projects in the field define a sourcing region and establish goals for farmer engagement and target sustainability concerns for improvement.  The latest updates on plans for metric revisions as well as a prototype system for independent verification of continuous improvement at the field and region level will also be discussed.