FAQ

You can add a tillage operation before a residue management activity to capture practices that occur prior to burning, such as rolling straw. The platform offers two activities specifically designed for rice: Roller residue stomper and Roller residue incorporator. These can be entered as a tillage operation in the sequence before the burning activity.

Baling and grazing are important activities to model for soil cover and carbon dynamics. When a grower bales or grazes a cash crop or residue from the cash crop, there is economic gain and that should be reflected in how GHG emissions are allocated and captured in the Platform.

For example, if a grower harvests corn grain, then bales the residue to use or sell as animal feed or biofuel feedstock, some emissions should be allocated to the baled corn residue, which will reduce the grain emissions, since the crop produced multiple products that had value. If a cover crop results in economic gain in the form of baled forage or live grazing, then that would convert the cover crop into a cash crop, even if the original intention was to grow the crop for cover.

Baling activities are not currently supported in Version 5. There are two related challenges that have not yet been resolved:

• Crop residue as a co-product, where an allocation factor (economic, mass, or other) would lower the GHG impacts attributed to the grain.
• Baling as a harvest operation that creates crop interval definition conflicts.

For grain commodities such as rice, the platform’s crop interval structure allows for one harvest operation, with the full impact allocated to the grain. The only commodity currently supported with multiple harvest activities within the same interval is alfalfa, as it is a perennial crop. Co-product support is currently only available for cotton, where an economic allocation factor is applied between cotton lint and cottonseed.

Enhanced support for co-products, multiple harvests, and allocation factors is planned for a future release.

Within a single alfalfa crop interval, different drying options can be used for each cutting, but with limitations. There are two questions to answer: Was the crop dried using energy? (If so) Where was the crop dried?

If one cutting was dried without energy, then another cutting can be dried, but only off-farm.

If one cutting was dried on-farm, then another cutting cannot be dried off-farm, and vice versa.

Not currently. If there are multiple irrigation water sources within a crop interval, the power source must be the same across all sources. For example, if a field was irrigated with groundwater and surface water, the power source for each must match (e.g. electricity and electricity, or diesel and diesel).

Similarly, if one source used power, the other cannot be left blank (indicating gravity-fed water).

Drying operations were reviewed and streamlined in Version 5 for greater transparency and usability. The following table shows the equivalent options between versions:

Note that if a crop is dried by a third party not associated with the grower, the platform defaults to “Commercially Dried,” which uses a dryer profile based on available industry information. This is treated as a post-harvest impact from an LCA perspective. If the farmer has full control of the dryer system, select “Where was the crop dried? On-Farm” to view available on-farm drying options. You can read more about the drying methods in the platform documentation.

Version 5 does not currently include an accounting method for on-farm solar or wind energy generation. This is a known limitation described in the metric revision documentation.

The Version 4 treatment of on-farm solar energy was considered inaccurate because it assigned 0 energy use and 0 GHG emissions to operations powered by on-farm solar, such as irrigation pumps or grain dryers. A complete and accurate method would need to include upstream impact factors associated with the manufacturing of solar panels and energy storage systems — similar to how the platform currently accounts for the upstream impacts of fertilizer manufacturing.

If on-farm solar energy generation is prevalent in your project, please contact Field to Market staff so we can begin planning to address this data gap.