Wrangler is underwriting the development of new cotton-specific farm management software features by MyFarms and will provide 125 MyFarms subscriptions for U.S. cotton growers.
By helping growers track and measure on-farm practices, Wrangler can more easily measure the environmental impact associated with its products and make verifiable claims about the sustainability of its U.S.-grown cotton supply.
“The MyFarms platform was built by farmers for farmers to make their jobs easier and more profitable,” said Chris Fennig, MyFarms founder and managing director. “In funding the expansion of our data exchange to cotton growers, Wrangler is effectively gifting the industry a powerful foundation for tracking and measuring both environmental outcomes and financial benefits.”
MyFarms is cloud-based software that allows growers to make crop management decisions by anonymously comparing their performance with their peers on metrics like average erosion rate and energy-use efficiency. The program integrates sustainability metrics from the Fieldprint Platform, a sustainability assessment framework developed by Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture. Both Wrangler and MyFarms are members of Field to Market.
Other features include automated calculators to save growers time in determining how much seed, fertilizer and spray to purchase for their fields; hourly rainfall and wind speed data; and precision agriculture map analysis.
The MyFarms cotton interface includes a feature that will make it quicker and easier for cotton growers to measure their sustainability performance and operational efficiency utilizing the Field to Market sustainability metrics. As a qualified data management partner, MyFarms uses the metric outcomes data generated by the Fieldprint Platform to quantify the environmental impact of cotton production for Wrangler, while returning valuable production insights to farmers.
“We’re excited to see the results of this software integration, particularly the support for cotton farmers through a seamless solution to measure the sustainability performance and efficiency of their operations by harnessing the sustainability metrics of the Fieldprint Platform,” said Rod Snyder, president of Field to Market. “Wrangler understands how important it is to reduce the reporting burden for farmers. And in the process, they could be creating a wealth of new knowledge and opportunities for the entire supply chain.”
The 125 MyFarms subscriptions will be available for the 2018 harvest season to cotton growers involved with numerous U.S. cotton initiatives, including e3 growers, Better Cotton Initiative (USA), Texas Alliance for Water Conservation and others.
“From Burden to Benefit: Sustainability Data in the Agricultural Supply Chain” – a new paper co-authored by Wrangler and MyFarms – shares best practices for protecting data privacy and strengthening supply-chain relationships around common sustainability goals. The paper draws on Wrangler’s experience in the cotton supply chain to share learnings relevant to other food and fiber industries, including how to build trust with growers, and how to align the business interests of different links in the supply chain.
“Farmers work diligently to bring a cotton crop to harvest each year and their challenges are many,” said Roian Atwood, sustainability director for Wrangler. “As an apparel manufacturer, Wrangler wants to improve the environmental performance of our products. But to ask growers to make an additional effort to track and share farm-level data, we need to try to create something of value for them in return. That’s one of key topics this newest paper explores.”
Source: Cotton Grower