Synopsis: Climate change is forcing a shift towards sustainable agriculture. Consumer demand for ESG-compliant products is driving this change. Technology plays a key role in achieving sustainability goals. Here, we showcase how Cropin's platform offers a unified and holistic view by integrating various metrics on a tailored dashboard to show the overall impact on sustainability goals. It enables organizations measure, monitor, and report their sustainability efforts throughout the agricultural supply.
In a world increasingly aware of the dire consequences of climate change, sustainable agriculture has emerged as a beacon of hope. As global temperatures rise, natural disasters become more frequent, and weather patterns grow erratic, the agricultural sector must swiftly adopt sustainable agricultural practices. Technology is a catalyst driving a transformative shift in food production and distribution, catering to conscious consumers moving towards a sustainable lifestyle.
The Evolution of Sustainable Agriculture: Riding the Waves of Change
To understand the need for technological advancements in sustainable agriculture, it's first essential to recognize agricultural practices' broader evolution. We can trace this transformation through three distinctive waves:
Gen Z, poised to become the majority of consumer decision-makers, prioritizes sustainability. This shift has fueled a booming market for products with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) claims.
A report from McKinsey in 2023 highlighted that 56% of the growth in the Consumer-Packaged Goods industry over the past five years came from products with ESG claims. This growth is further supported by the global sustainable agriculture market, valued at $13.32 billion and projected to reach approximately $31 billion by 2031.
The implications of these statistics are clear—sustainability is no longer just a buzzword; it's a critical aspect of business strategy and will drive grassroots-level changes in agriculture operations.
Research from IBM highlights that over 80% of CEOs believe sustainability investments will boost business results in the next five years, emphasizing its strategic importance on the board and driving business transformation.
This commitment implies that we must ADAPT to the dynamic regulations, EVOLVE through data-driven Good Agricultural Practices & GROW alongside environmentally conscious consumers who value sustainable products.
The time is ripe for us to ponder over these questions:
- Is sustainability the new competitive advantage in today’s market?
- If yes, are you prepared to meet the evolving demands of sustainability?
- Are you enabled to measure, report, and verify sustainable practices in the food value chain?
Digital Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture: A Path to Greener Future
Organizations committed to achieving environmental, social, and economic sustainability must digitize the first mile of their supply chains for real-time monitoring. Achieving sustainability goals necessitates strategic partnerships and collaborations to maximize productivity and profit and minimize environmental footprint.
Cropin provides a suite of solutions that offer a unified and holistic view of the agricultural supply chain to enable the transformation to a more sustainable future. This integrated open ecosystem platform is an essential building block that leverages state-of-the-art technology, including satellite imaging, artificial intelligence, and geo-location data.
Using the Cropin Cloud platform, organizations can gain a transparent, traceable, and measurable unified view across their food supply chains. This visibility is critical for making sustainable choices in sourcing and production.
Your Sustainability Dashboard: Tailoring Solutions for Diverse Agricultural Needs
The agricultural sector is marked by the dynamic and diverse nature of crops and geographies. When implementing sustainable agriculture, a one-size-fits-all solution will not work. While many solutions help measure and monitor different aspects of the food value chain, a platform that integrates all these metrics to show the overall impact on sustainability goals has been elusive—until now.
With a clear understanding of this, Cropin Cloud enables you to build an integrated and tailored dashboard showcasing the impact you are driving against your sustainability goals efficiently and effectively. These customizable dashboards allow organizations to focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to their sustainability goals. Metrics like water and energy consumption, carbon tracking, soil nutrition, emissions, regenerative practices as per crop type, etc., can be visualized in a single, easy-to-understand dashboard.
The dashboard widgets can be tailored to align with the organization’s core priorities, program objectives and then operationalized accordingly. Organizational-level sustainability programs comprise multiple discrete projects. The flexibility of these dashboards allows organizations to
- Reflect on their supply chain operations
- Make decisions about the sustainability of the produce
- Meet critical regulatory compliances
- Devise optimization strategies required to meet organization-level goals
Understanding the extent and impact of individual projects and the program holistically is crucial to managing and improving the program's impact. Cropin offers embedded BI reports and visualizations for enhanced clarity on a real-time basis.
For example, an organization may desire to monitor loans disbursed, farmers enrolled, sustainability training provided in a specific program, etc. All relevant data for such programs can be collected on the platform through forms and images from the field and accessed through aggregated reports.
The dashboard also presents scorecards devised according to the organization’s impact management framework. This helps organizations comply with regulatory standards and report their sustainability efforts effectively.
Let’s now examine some of the sustainability-specific metrics that Cropin Cloud can help you measure, monitor, and report.
Deforestation Analysis for Sustainable Sourcing
One of the foremost environmental challenges in agriculture is deforestation, which primarily occurs in the first mile. Regulations like the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) require companies to ensure their products come from deforestation-free land and validate this claim.
Cropin's platform addresses this by providing both regional and plot-level deforestation analysis. It provides crop-agnostic regional intelligence with detailed crop identification, acreage, and yield estimates. At the regional level, historical deforestation analysis uses land-use land cover and deforestation maps for insights into land-use changes over time.
At the plot level, Cropin assists organizations in identifying plots that have overlapped deforested land since the specified baseline year. It facilitates informed sourcing decisions that adhere to regulatory requirements. By integrating deforestation analysis with first-mile digitalization data, organizations can ensure deforestation-free supply chains and incentivize farmers to promote the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices.
Carbon Management and Tracking in Sustainable Agriculture
Organizations are dedicated to implementing production-oriented measures and removal programs in today's carbon management and monitoring landscape.
Cropin’s intelligent agriculture cloud platform facilitates both aspects by defining and configuring baseline, primary, and secondary data for each crop group. This involves collecting ground truth data through your own or your supplier field staff, validating it through satellite imagery analysis, and presenting the total carbon emissions and sequestration in unified dashboards.
Cropin has developed and established validation models that utilize satellite imagery analysis. These models cover an array of critical areas, such as carbon footprint tracking, water usage, soil management, and agroforestry applications. Enterprises can also create an overall scoring algorithm compiling the model outputs.
Cropin’s contextually enabled, global scale deployable remote sensing data based and AI/ML powered intelligence models, specifically designed to support sustainability programs in the agriculture sector:
Field management practices for stakeholders in the supply chain can be codified using the no-code enterprise solution for configuring data structures. This facilitates digitization and Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV). Organizations can leverage these to define, structure, and quantify greenhouse gas emissions and soil carbon sequestration.
The web interface's plan types can streamline carbon accounting and monitoring and drive standardization across geographies and various teams, among other things.
Flexibility in Task Configuration and Data Capture
Configuring tasks and capturing diverse data types is a critical challenge in agriculture, requiring flexibility in data collection and analysis.
One key advantage of the Cropin platform is its flexibility in configuring tasks and data capture. The technology allows organizations to collect and evaluate evidence to quantify various metrics related to farm operations. These could be around productivity, sustainability, carbon, water, greenhouse gas emissions, and their optimum management with real-time data points.
Cropin Cloud allows the ingestion of a wide range of data types, such as text, numeric data, images, geo-coordinates, etc., which makes it a versatile tool for data capture and analysis. Suppliers and other stakeholders can also mass upload flat files through moderated access and API integration with other platforms.
The geo-coordinates and timestamps captured validate the authenticity of the data.
Streamlined Calculations for Sustainability Metrics
Streamlining complex calculations for sustainability metrics poses a challenge.
The Cropin platform offers a smart computing feature that uses arithmetic formulae and equations for on-the-go calculators. These calculators use data points to compute various parameters, and formulae-based outputs can be triggered by an event to update certain attributes. This feature streamlines complex calculations and enhances the efficiency of data analysis and reporting.
Offline Data Capture for Remote Farms
Offline data capture from remote farms is crucial to ensuring seamless and disruption-free data collection. Cropin platform includes a mobile application that allows offline operability, an essential for remote regions. The application is available for both Android and Apple devices.
In-Depth Plot-Level Intelligence for Informed Sourcing:
It is vital to gain in-depth knowledge on cultivation methods, ground cover vegetation, and deforestation at the plot level. These are key to validating compliance, making informed sourcing choices, and understanding the environmental implications of procurement and farming operations.
Cropin empowers organizations to gain plot-level intelligence. This includes critical data on crop health, greenness, water stress, crop stage, warning on disease potential tillage, cover crops, and deforestation. Access to this level of detail empowers organizations to make informed decisions in the first mile of the supply chain.
Compliance Reporting and Validation Models for Sustainable Agriculture:
Complying with environmental regulations and standards is challenging. Organizations need insights, data, and validation models for various sustainability aspects. They need an unbiased digital MRV system in place.
Cropin’s time-stamped data collection process facilitates compliance reporting by providing intelligence to help organizations meet regulatory requirements. The technology includes validation models for nature-based solutions, deforestation analysis, above-ground biomass analysis, tillage and cover crop identification, carbon emission and footprint analysis, etc.
Cropin thus enables an unbiased digital MRV to validate compliance with environmental regulations and standards and their ESG claims. Customized BI dashboards and API outputs are available to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.
Cropin's Vision: A Technology-Enabled Future for Sustainable Agriculture
Cropin's intelligent agriculture cloud platform is a cost-effective and efficient tool for implementing sustainable agriculture in the first mile. It has the capacity to nurture the next generation of farmers while empowering organizations to improve supply chain management and build new sourcing strategies.
With its technology-driven approach, the scalable Cropin Cloud platform has the potential to usher in a brighter future for sustainable agriculture. It seamlessly integrates economic sustainability and social equity into the agricultural landscape, benefiting both the industry and the communities it serves.
