Being a farmer has never been easy, but in today’s world it is probably one of the most challenging occupations one could choose to pursue. On the one hand, erratic weather patterns are affecting farming productivity and established practices, on the other, the growing awareness of agriculture’s environmental impact is triggering demand for greater transparency about how crops are grown by regulators, consumers and industry participants in general.

In the attempt to better track and manage the impact of farming, hundreds of organizations - companies, NGOs, universities, and grower organizations - are investing significant time and resources into multi-stakeholder initiatives to develop shared sustainability metrics. A report from 2020 by US Farmers & Ranchers tracked 16 such initiatives active in the US alone. However, the same report mentioned that only 25% of food companies were using the metrics they themselves helped create, though many continued sending individual data requests to farmers. This created a multitude of uncoordinated requests that add to the burden of compliance with public regulations.

These figures are both a symptom and cause of the enormous fragmentation that exists in global food systems. Despite acknowledging the problem, the industry is still far from achieving unified standards that could be used to assess farming’s environmental and climate impact in a scalable, reliable, and economical way. This is why implementing effective strategies to break down data silos and improving data sharing and collaboration should be one of the industry’s priorities.

The sheer scale of the sustainability problem

According to estimates by the IPCC and other international bodies, activities directly and indirectly related to agriculture account for about ¼ of global GHG emissions and consume more than 2/3 of the global freshwater supply. To make matters worse, the statistics about desertification and native vegetation loss are appalling: according to the FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment of 2020, 10 million hectares of forest have been lost yearly between 2015 and 2020 (or about 30,000 football fields every day, to better grasp the scale of this catastrophe). This in turn has a massive impact on biodiversity loss: by some accounts, global agriculture is responsible for almost ½ of total expected biodiversity loss, with unpredictable long-term impact on all ecological systems.

This issue is so important that last year the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) held in Montréal stated that “As a result of human activity [Nature] is experiencing its largest loss of life since the dinosaurs. One million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades” and has ended with a landmark agreement including concrete measures to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30 per cent of the planet and 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030.

Despite the huge benefits in terms of productivity, in many cases the innovations introduced through modern intensive farming have negatively affected soil fertility, with the risk of making agricultural production less resilient in the long term.

Regenerative farming is helping address these challenges: practices such as reduced soil tillage, or planting cover crops to protect the soil in the off-season, or agroforestry (the planting of trees that is deliberately combined with agriculture on the same piece of land). These practices can all help restore soil health and sequester carbon, with obvious long-term benefits from a climate and environmental standpoint.

It is through these farming methods, combined with a better system of measurement and tracking implementation of such practices that we can help to preserve natural habitats and protect our agricultural ecosystems.

Challenges to driving change

However, according to the Climate Policy Initiative, it could require an estimated $4.5-5 trillion annually to finance this transition, giving a sense of the challenge for individuals, organisations, and governments who are considering making changes to combat climate change.

To sustain the risks that farmers face with the transition to regenerative agriculture and mobilize green capital for such transition, a creative tool has been provided by carbon farming credits, which represent emissions reductions through soil carbon sequestration, creating assets financed by companies who have voluntarily committed to reduce their carbon footprint.

However, several concerns about the efficacy, fairness, and economic scalability of carbon farming credits have emerged in recent times. Among the key issues, the complexity of collecting reliable baseline data to substantiate claims and the cost of monitoring compliance over time, drastically limit the number of farmers that can be effectively approached. Moreover, despite some recent action towards more transparency, there don’t seem to be entirely reliable methods to substantiate some of the core carbon principles underpinning carbon credits, as defined by the by the International Council for Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (ICVCM), such as additionality or non-duplication.

Unfortunately, without a concerted effort to drive down costs and promote transparency, the issue will remain unresolved and – consequently – precious time for the transformation of the food systems will be lost.

Creating a universal geospatial language to foster collaboration and data exchange

Hence why Varda has been building a new digital infrastructure that would provide a universal language for agriculture: Global FieldID™ (GFID). To provide an easier analogy, consider living in a city where each person can give any name they desire to the streets and squares. In such a situation, it would be difficult to locate anyone or anything. This is similar to the current state of the agriculture industry where the basic units of food production, such as fields and land plots, are identified differently by each participant, making it impossible to communicate and share available information in a scalable and practical way.

In an industry where fragmentation is the norm and each stakeholder (farmers, agronomists, input manufacturers, ag retailers, grain traders, etc.) may hold a tiny piece of information, the discoverability of such information remains limited, creating serious impediments for effective collaboration. Worst of all, the lack of such a common identifier penalizes virtuous farmers by making it more difficult for them to “advertise” their sustainability credentials to the supply chain.

Although industry participants have been discussing the issue of fragmentation and data silos for years, there hasn’t been a globally scaled initiative to solve this problem. While other start-ups and consortia have tackled compatibility between different services, what is needed is a broad, systematic approach that can cover the entire world in an affordable way.

The bottom line

Through GFID, we aim to enable industry stakeholders to ‘speak the same language’, improving the interoperability of digital farming tools and data exchange across the whole food value chain.

This innovation will allow businesses to more easily harmonize different sources of data about their fields, crops, and farming practices, and to transfer the key pieces of information throughout the supply chain. GFID is provided entirely free of charge to farmers, NGOs and Academia to accelerate information flow and more effectively mobilize the required resources for the transition to a more sustainable, resilient, and transparent food system.