Field to Market recently held its annual meeting in Kansas City. During the event, attendees got a sneak peek at the Fieldprint Platform 5.0, which helps farmers measure the environmental impacts of their crop production and increase profitability. We caught up with Field to Market president Carrie Vollmer-Sanders in Kansas City for a look at how it works.

“Sometimes it's helpful to look back at the data and say, did that really work the way we thought it would? Or what were all the variables? So, with the Fieldprint Platform, there's an opportunity to put in data that goes beyond carbon. So, other metrics that they're evaluating, energy use, biodiversity, water use, water quality. Essentially, there's three different things that look at soil and give you kind of this overarching impact of the farm. And one of the things that we've been talking about is in this new platform, could we also add insights for the grower?”

“So, for example, you've inputted all the data. You might ask the platform, how could I decrease my energy use? So, we've been testing this out. It hasn't launched yet. It's going through some iterations still. But what in preliminary results have shared is it gave the farmer three different areas where it could change energy use. And then within those three areas, it gave three or four different examples of what the farmer could look at to decrease the energy use on the farm.”

Version 5.0 is expected to launch August 1. Head to FieldToMarket.org for more information on the platform.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.