1. Cool Farms Tool – Crop GHG Calculator (CSAb)
Cool Farms Tool (CFT) is the most widely used global calculator of on-farm GHG emissions, with supporting metrics for biodiversity and water. It is free to farmers. However, the five-year old tool now requires a major overhaul and several enhancements to improve data sets & user-experience.
IMPACT: GHG mitigation, supply chain management; PepsiCo halved emissions from its potato farmers within 5 years using the CFT
STAGE: working with Climate-KIC flagship Climate-Smart Agriculture Booster, the Scaler project will report key learnings in 2017
SCALE: 15,000 farm footprints have been generated. The new CFT will enable more global food brands to understand environmental impacts and mitigation opportunities in their agricultural supply chains and report these to consumers. From 2017, the CFT will be available in French and Spanish.
CFT is a key enabler supporting brands and retailers that are pursuing more sustainable practices in line with their consumer commitments (e.g. science-based targets). The CFA and CFT serve to plug the gap that currently exists between the expectations of consumers on food businesses to act responsibly, and the ability of those businesses to understand environmental impacts and mitigation opportunities in their agricultural supply chains.
The CFA is the largest global network of organisations tackling on-farm GHG emissions. Over farm footprints have been generated using the CFT, and the addition of 12 new members in the past 12 months demonstrates the momentum building behind the Alliance.
For example, PepsiCo recently reported a 50% reduction in emissions from its potato farmers within 5 years using the Tool, identifying opportunities such as lower impact fertilisers, optimised fertiliser usage, increased yields, and on-farm energy efficiency. Other opportunities identified by CFA members include introduction of cover crops (to increase soil organic matter leading to carbon sequestration), and reduced tillage to reduce soil emissions.
GHG: Reducing tillage and adding cover crops can reduce and offset problem emissions while building soil health. But each farm and field responds differently. The Cool Farm Tool allows farmers to find out how their fields respond to the management options of interest.
WATER: With 70 percent of fresh water globally consumed by agriculture, farmers and supply chains are often called on to provide assessments of water used for crop production and ensure efficiency.
BIODIVERSITY: Bird nesting boxes, set asides of hedges or trees, leaving un-mown strips or using selective crop protection products to spare beneficial insects are examples from the wide range of practices that score points.
The scope of the CFT Biodiversity metric is whole farm. The other metrics – GHG and Water – are calculated on a crop by crop basis, so this method is different in this respect.
It takes just minutes to get a rough estimate of your carbon footprint by entering information off the top of your head. To refine this estimate using information from farm records can take a bit longer, minutes. Often the most time consuming part is looking up or estimating kWh and fuel for the year for the given crop from electricity and fuel bills