Quality Control in Marketing Agricultural Data

The quality of data has a significant impact on the accuracy of a carbon product footprint. Mandated reporting is coming, and will apply to every food company and retailer.

It’s fair to complain about how complicated and difficult it is to measure and collect true information on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions committed on farms and by the manufacturers of crop inputs. It falls to corporate marketing departments to up their game and insist on quality data to base climate claims on.

Check out how Oatly and their platform Carbon Cloud have tackled the challenge, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model measuring crop-based fuel feedstocks. As the precedent of marketing transparency in everything from grain crops to chocolate milk takes hold, it will eventually become impossible to hide the true environmental impacts behind commodity agriculture.

Getting there is going to involve an incredible amount of new work – which is the reason why measuring, validating and reporting (MRV) has quickly become its own, fast-growing professional discipline. Let’s explore a few different types of data collection systems, and what they mean.