John Deere and Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture have announced a pilot program that integrates sustainability metrics of Field to Market’s Fieldprint Platform into John Deere’s Operations Center to help cotton growers more easily capture data necessary for field-level environmental analysis.

The collaboration enables producers to leverage existing field, crop, and machine data to seamlessly assess the environmental performance of their management practices across the Fieldprint Platform’s eight sustainability metrics.

“With a proven track record of benchmark innovations that have transformed the entire cotton harvesting processing industry from field to gin, we are excited to continue this legacy by championing digital innovations that help our customers document and demonstrate their sustainability impact,” said Alexey Rostapshov, head of John Deere Labs & Sustainability. “Enabling farmers to more easily assess their Field to Market sustainability metrics and share these down the supply chain is an important step in helping improve our customers’ productivity, profitability, and sustainability.”

After successfully testing the integration of the Fieldprint Platform’s sustainability metrics within Operations Center with a test group of cotton producers, Deere is expanding the pilot to allow more cotton producers to leverage existing data to document and demonstrate their stewardship and sustainability performance.

The initial pilot proved that Operations Center substantially streamlines the data collection process, leveraging existing field, crop, and machine data to pre-populate nearly two-thirds of the data needed to generate the Fieldprint Platform’s sustainability metrics and enable farmers to benchmark their sustainability performance with Field to Market.

“The combination of the Fieldprint Platform’s sustainability metrics with John Deere’s precision technology platform will equip farmers with a powerful tool for measuring and advancing their stewardship and impact,” said Brandon Hunnicutt, Chair of Field to Market’s Board of Directors. “By leveraging a streamlined approach to collecting sustainability data, John Deere is simplifying and scaling farmers’ access to a robust analysis of their environmental performance.”

The streamlined sustainability analysis in Operations Center will provide cotton producers with a new tool to help facilitate enrollment in the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol – a sustainability initiative of the U.S. cotton industry.

“This collaboration between Field to Market and John Deere is a significant step forward in streamlining data collection and creates an excellent opportunity to expand participation in the Trust Protocol program,” said Dr. Gary Adams, president of the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol. “As a result of John Deere’s continued leadership in our industry, cotton farmers have greater access to measure progress and support the industry in pushing the frontier of sustainability and leading the worldwide effort in responsible cotton production.”

Deere is now expanding efforts to assist more cotton producers interested in enrolling in the Trust Protocol. The integration will support the continuous improvement and enrollment goals of the Trust Protocol, allowing enrolled producers to measure the environmental impacts of their operation and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

John Deere will also evaluate future integration to additional crops, allowing commodity farmers to harness data and insights to tell their crops’ sustainability story.

Based on information from John Deere and Field to Market