The Platform measures the impact of farm management practices on 8 sustainability metrics: Biodiversity, Energy Use, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Irrigation Water Use, Land Use, Soil Carbon, Soil Conservation and Water Quality. To learn more about how these metrics are calculated, please visit our Metrics Documentation.

The following models are used as the backbone for the Fieldprint Platform’s eight sustainability indicators:

• USDA’s Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) and Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS)
• USDA’s STEP
• SWAT+
• Habitat Potential Index (HPI)

For mor information on how these models work and impact our eight sustainability indicators, please see our metrics documentation website.

All eight indicators are calculated simultaneously. The Platform cannot calculate one indicator separately because much of the data a user enters is used for multiple calculations. For example, to determine Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Energy Use must first be calculated. In irrigated fields, irrigation water use affects the amount of energy consumed, which then affects the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide emitted as a result.

See Table 4, Fieldprint Platform v5 Sources, using this documentation webpage. The soil carbon stock changes component is a positive value (sources) when emissions are estimated, and a negative value (sinks) when the model estimates carbon sequestration. N2O emissions are not a sink; the model always estimates some N2O emissions. N2O emissions are highly influenced by applications of synthetic fertilizer and manure, and by crop residue amounts after crop harvest. N2O emissions are attributed to the crop that received the nutrient applications.

Project benchmarks are only available to be used by Fieldprint Projects. A Project Benchmark is the average Fieldprint metric value for all fields within a specific project that share the same scope (such as crop type or irrigation). These benchmarks are more meaningful to growers because they reflect results from others in the same region and project. They are calculated as weighted averages of field-level data, which can be area weighted, or production weighted.

National and state benchmarks take publicly available data from USDA for crop production information related to inputs (nutrients, pesticides), outputs (yield), and we create a production profile based on irrigation type (irrigated, non-irrigated). We average five years of data (2008-2012, inclusive) and estimate the metrics using weighted averages at the national and state level.