What’s New in Version 5

Version 5 will better support supply chain sustainability and emissions reporting. ​ Value-Added benefits:

• Enhanced scientific rigor with transparency and documentation​
• Strengthened emissions tracking and sustainability reporting capabilities​
• Incorporates estimation of quantitative soil carbon fluxes
• Updated metrics incorporating latest scientific methodologies​ we can implement at scale
• Aligned framework with lifecycle assessment (LCA) principles​
• Streamlined data entry with improved user interface

Fieldprint Platform Version 5 has significant metric and feature updates with enhanced scientific rigor, transparency and documentation. The updates within Version 5 strengthens emissions tracking and sustainability reporting capabilities. This section will cover the scope of and key details of what the V5 updates encompass.

Overview of Indicator Enhancements

The Version 5 launch has three major indicator updates— 

1. Energy Use: Revisions have been made to align this metric with a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) approach. This indicator now encapsulates energy used in the production of one crop in one year from pre-planting activates to the first point of sale.  

2. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Updates have been made to the impact factors and methods for GHG emission quantification, with a key update being disaggregation of GHG emission sources and gases to align with SBTi and the GHG Protocol. 

3. Soil Carbon: A transition has been made to utilize SWAT+ (Soil and Water Assessment Tool Plus) as the new model of choice that underpins this indicator. This indicator was previously qualitative and is now quantitative.  

Learn more on these changes in the support site indicator changes article and in our metrics documentation website.

Overview of Feature Enhancements

This section outlines the updated features and tools available in V5 (non-indicator enhancements).  

1. Multi-Year Field History Approach: This transition to multi-year field history improves sustainability analysis and provides the continuity needed for crop rotation insights. This update also supports soil carbon modelling.  
2. Multiple Crop Intervals in Single Year: This provides great flexibility to users and supports the calculations that underpin the Soil Carbon indicator. Non-Field to Market crop history are included now but it is important to note that a FIeldprint analysis cannot be completed on non-Field to Market crops.  
3. Changes to Data Inputs 
   • Activity Date, Operation/Equipment, and Fuel Used are new inputs that appear across multiple activity types but are counted only once in the summary.  
   • The Crop Rotation System is no longer a direct input but derived from individual crop entries across years. The crop rotation library no longer exists as the rotations are derived using satellite data from USDA’s Cropland Data Layer (CDL) to predict what was grown each year on a given field.
   • Each activity type (Planting, Tillage, Harvest, etc.) has its own date field, but these are considered implementations of the same core “Activity Date” field. 
   • Field Details are a separate tab in the Platform and will alleviate entering yearly data for field details that do not change on a yearly basis, such as structural conservation practices, drain tile and land use change. These practices will factor into any Fieldprint analysis completed for this field regardless of crop interval/crop grown, decreasing the data burden to farmers.
   • Abandoned Acres are their own management activity and assumed to account for the whole field acres. Partial field acres are no longer accepted.

Learn more on these changes in the support site indicator changes article and in our metrics documentation website.

Web Interface Changes

The web interface on the data entry side and the Fieldprint analysis section have been greatly improved to better support clearer data entry and an overall better user experience. With these enhancements, some features from Version 4 have been removed while others are on hold.

Key interfaces will be redesigned with intuitive data flow, improved colors, and better layout for streamlined data input and analysis. A new scorecard-style metric display will allow users to click on results for detailed data and metric explanations.

Summary of changes:

• Unlike Version 4 where users entered a complete set of data for single crop interval on a field, Version 5 introduces a complete crop history on the field, from 2008 to present. Users review a minimal set of data for all crop intervals and then complete the full data set for crop intervals where a Fieldprint analysis is desired.
• The Fieldprint analysis page has been redesign for enhanced whole farm planning and educational purposes. Each indicator has its own scorecard which details the results, how to improve the score, why the indicator matters, and information on how the score is calculated.
• Dedicated Field Details section to eliminate the need to enter data yearly on conservation practices, tile drainage and land use change (features that rarely changes year over year).
• There will also be an increase in the number of questions for data entry. While many of these questions will have pre-filled data based on national or state averages when available, there will be 43 new inputs, 26 modified inputs, and 30 eliminated inputs. Learn more on the input changes here.

Eliminated features:

• Farm-level Habitat Potential Index – keeping with our current field level indicators, the farm-level survey is no longer available.
• Manage acres – while projects may find it helpful to keep track of managed acres, farmers rarely reported benefits of reporting managed acres into the platform. To eliminate confusion regarding entered and managed acres, managed acres have been removed from the platform.

Features on hold:

Due to time constraints and feature usage, a few platform features have been placed on hold and will be implemented as time allows in the future. If any of these features are particularly important, please reach out to the Field to Market team so we can prioritize adding these features into Version 5 of the Platform.

• Import and Export of Field Boundaries
• COMET-Planner
• TSC Report; learn more about our partnership with TSC here.

General Data Trends

We expect increases in estimates of GHG emissions.  

• New sources of GHG emissions will add to the total (urea, liming, land use change, soil carbon stock changes).
• Minor increases: GHG emissions associated with electricity generation and distribution, and manufacturing of fuels.
• For irrigated cropland, a significant increase will come from the updated method for irrigation operations.

Data Migration

All complete data and field boundaries from Version 4 of the Fieldprint Platform has been migrated to Version 5. Incomplete data and abandoned acres did not transfer.

All project associations from finalized fields have also transferred to Version 5.0. Fields that were provisional are not associated with a project; however, this association can easily be made in Version 5.0.

Learn more in our Data Migration article.