US-based dairy-foods manufacturer Stonyfield, tired of using siloed technologies on-farm, is joining forces in a new connected-tech program known as OpenTEAM to help it sequester more carbon and improve on-farm soil health.
The company hopes to use the resulting data to reduce its farms’ carbon emissions 30% by 2030, prove the company’s environmental credentials, and sell Stonyfield produce – primarily yoghurt – at a higher price point.
OpenTEAM, which stands for Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management, is a software platform led by Wolfe’s Neck Center (WNC) in tandem with Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, LandPKS and others, offers farmers “fast, easy access to more accurate recommendations on the specific things they can do to improve soil health on their farm” and netted WNC FoodShot’s GroundBreaker ‘Seed’ Prize in 2019 for its “ambitious vision… to democratize [sic] access to environmental data and provide universal access to site-specific global agricultural knowledge”.
OpenTEAM merges various existing tools including those for farm record-keeping and remote sensing, with agroecosystem models such as COMET, DNDC, and Cool Farm Tool, making these tools more efficient and cost-effective for farmers, explains a Stonyfield spokesperson. The team has MOUs with several other tech providers and researchers to add more tools.
Initial research will take place at WNC’s working organic dairy farm in Freeport, Maine. Once the software is ready to deploy, it will be tested at 10-15 diverse Hub Farms. By 2024, the partners aim to have the platform operative and providing quantitative feedback on millions of acres of farmland.
The long-term vision is to create a global network of farms that use OpenTEAM to improve soil health and fight climate change collectively.
Source: Yoghurt maker Stonyfield wants to use data, not certification to prove environmental benefit of its practises https://agfundernews.com/yogurt-maker-stonyfield-wants-to-use-data-not-certification-to-prove-environmental-benefit-of-its-practices.html I AgFunder News