Did you know that SWAT MAPS Premium and Yield Potential Program customers have access to SWAT CERTIFIED sustainability reporting? These are reports that demonstrate farm sustainability and years of good stewardship. They avoid many of the current pitfalls in sustainability reporting because they are rigorous and highly detailed. 

Let’s use an analogy to explain the current pitfalls of sustainability reporting:

Imagine that the government implements a program to incentivize people to get healthier. The government decides that weight loss is key for improving health and that calorie reduction is the only proven way to lose weight. They incentivize people to reduce calories by paying them for using a calorie tracking app on their phone and showing a daily calorie reduction over their initial baseline. 

You decide you want to get healthier.  You do some research and learn that you need to change your diet and increase exercise. You start exercising and change what you eat. You build muscle mass and increase your metabolism.  The total calories you consume every day don’t decrease but you focus on high quality protein and lots of vegetables. You are much healthier than you were before, as indicated by your blood pressure, cholesterol ratios, improved sleep, and overall energy level. Your weight even increases slightly due to muscle gain. Despite being much healthier, you don’t qualify for the government incentive because you didn’t decrease your calorie intake.  Based on the government’s criteria, you are not healthier. 

This is very similar to the current state of sustainability incentives in farming. Farming metrics are overly simplistic, just like only measuring reduced calories. Practices that may or may not be applicable are applied without differentiation for regional context: practices like reduced fertilizer use, zero tillage, cover crops. Does implementing the metric actually result in greater soil health and reduced environmental impact?  Just as reducing calories doesn’t necessarily mean increased human health, neither does implementing cover crops necessarily mean increased soil health.

For fun, we can take the calorie reduction analogy one step further. Under pressure from Big Cake, who fear the government incentive will reduce cake sales, the government introduces the option for people to purchase “calorie offsets” in the app. This allows people to buy calorie reductions from their friends (who don’t like cake anyway) and apply them to their own daily total. With calorie offsets they can access the incentive payment reducing any calories at all.  They can eat as much cake as they want!

The reality is that in both the human health and sustainable farming cases, better is always going to be much more complicated than what can be measured from one simplistic measurement (one can assume that you can be healthy and still eat cake sometimes). 

What would a better system look like? To start, it takes more than one measurement. Like getting a full physical from your doctor, rather than entering a calorie number in an app. SWAT MAPS provides you with a “full physical” version of measurements for your farm. Real metrics on soil health and yield potential. These are things that improve both the environmental impact on your farm and your profitability.

There is a growing demand from members of the farm value chain to see farm sustainability data and reports.  Canadian banks, both voluntarily and due to regulatory requirements, must start to report on the sustainability of their portfolios, and are putting programs into place that incentivize sustainable farming practices. Market-based incentives are developing as well, due in part to changing legislation in Europe, such as the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) or from growing biofuel markets. It is expected that more incentive programs will come in the future due to various global pressures on large food companies to meet their climate change commitments and as markets for biofuels grow. Having your data ready to go will make it easier to access incentives in the future.

Currently, a farmer may want to have a SWAT CERTIFIED Sustainability or 4R Stewardship Report to have concrete metrics demonstrating their good land stewardship. Farmers using SWAT MAPS for precision agriculture are doing really great things that are not always recognized as sustainable agriculture. This sustainability certification will help farmers get acknowledged and recognized for the results of years of beneficial management practices.   

Learn all about it in Croptimistic’s Sustainability Report.