Announcing Proposed Revisions to Three Fieldprint Platform Metrics

This site serves as a space to describe the Fieldprint Platform metric revisions.

Background

Field to Market’s governance requires that metric revisions be brought up for member and public comment.

The Metrics Committee makes recommendations to the Board of Directors on existing metric revisions as science updates become available. The committee makes recommendations to the Board and General Assembly on including new metrics and indicators in Field to Market’s program. The committee also oversees metrics alignment with other sustainability programs and standards.

The Metrics Committee is an elected, multi-stakeholder governance body of equal representation from Field to Market’s membership sectors: Grower, Agribusiness, Brands and Retail, Civil Society, and Affiliate (public sector and academia).

Field to Market aims to provide to the agricultural value chain a comprehensive, transparent, and accessible platform for sustainability solutions. Field to Market provides a pre-competitive, stable, and collaborative space to create sustainability solutions for the alliance’s members.

Metric Revisions

Since mid-2023, Field to Market staff and the Metrics Committee have been working to complete the proposed metrics revisions. The models and data references for the Energy Use, GHG Emissions, and Soil Carbon metrics are intertwined and revisions must be completed together.

These revisions are crucial in keeping the Fieldprint Platform updated, transparent, and credible. While the Energy Use and GHG Emissions metrics were revised for the Fieldprint Platform 3.0 release in 2018, which brought the Application Programming Interface (API) into existence along with several significant enhancements, these metrics currently follow a framework developed during the late 2000s. Advances during the last fifteen years in the GHG emission quantification space for agriculture, in life cycle assessments (LCA) for agricultural production, and the availability of several updated or new reference data made it imperative to revise these metrics.

In addition, the current model of choice for the Soil Carbon metric has been a qualitative index since the metric inclusion in Field to Market’s program in 2012, which does not account for quantitative soil carbon stock changes. In early 2024, the Metrics Committee voted on selecting the SWAT+ model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool Plus) as the new model of choice for the Soil Carbon metric. This will enable the Fieldprint Platform to have a quantitative Soil Carbon metric and include soil carbon stock changes into the GHG Emissions metric. The implementation of the SWAT+ model into the Fieldprint Platform has been possible through a collaboration with Colorado State University One Water Solutions Institute (OWSI), USDA ARS, and Texas A&M. The One Water Solutions Institute operates under the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University; Field to Market has been collaborating with OWSI since 2012.

The revisions proposed here strengthen the Fieldprint Platform’s original objective.

Intended audiences for the materials included in the metric revisions

• Directors of sustainability and similar roles in charge of designing grower engagement projects for their organizations’ supply sheds.
• Program managers, technicians, analysts, and similar roles who are in charge of collecting grower data to run the Fieldprint Platform.
• Individuals with roles in the standard and reporting space that report to standard-setter organizations or have similar internal initiatives.
• Scientists from academia, non-profits, or private organizations in search of solutions to measure sustainability metrics in agricultural production.
• Users of the Fieldprint Platform, such as growers, University Extension agents, and scientists.

Steps after public comments

The Metrics Committee will review the comments received during the public comment period to evaluate the need for any changes. The Metrics Committee is confident that this update is necessary, that we are following the best available science that can be implemented at scale, and that these revisions are critical for the Fieldprint Platform to keep helping small, medium, and large organizations in their sustainability efforts.

How to submit comments

Please send comments via email to science@fieldtomarket.org. We anticipate that comments will be anonymized, summarized, and posted on a Public Comments section on this website.

The comment period will run from Monday, March 10, 2025 to Thursday, April 10, 2025. Members and stakeholders are highly encouraged to submit comments as soon as possible.

How to access the proposal for revisions

The following links contain the proposal (left) and the supplementary material (right).

The links are also accessible from the top navigation bar.

Additions, updates, and corrections

In this section, we will describe time-stamped additions, updates, clarifications, and corrections incorporated after launching the public comment period.

• 2025-03-16: Addition of eleven scenarios demonstrating results from some of the revised methods and impact factors. See Scenarios under Supplementary Material.
• 2025-05-19: Addition of public comments. Comment responses are ongoing.