Building a digital technology solution to support the monitoring, reporting and verification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the food supply chain

Background

The “food carbon management” project aims to address the pressing issue of measuring carbon emissions in agriculture based supply chains by implementing a comprehensive carbon management system. This project integrates two core elements: 

  • The ingestion of data for the measurement of supply chain practices.
  • The measurement of improvements against standardised metrics with a strong basis in empirical research, published data sets, and recognised standards like IPCC methodologies.

The project leverages the data and capabilities of the food and drink testbed to facilitate data exchange and analysis.

Challenge Description

With the replacement of the common agricultural policy with the environmental land management scheme and the Government’s net zero growth plan and nature markets framework, the landscape for agriculture is changing with both consumers and regulators creating incentives for more sustainable practices. These incentives represent multi-billion pound opportunities in the carbon market for British farmers, landowners and their partners across the supply chain. In order to access these incentives effectively, improved data management and analysis needs to occur across the end food supply chain: from seed to shelf.

Whilst a new harmonised approach to measuring impact has been agreed, most farmers and processors do not yet have access to the robust technology tools to monitor, report and verify the GHG emissions across the supply chain starting with farms.

To ensure that these incentives are able to benefit as many supply chain actors as possible, simple and easy to adopt tools need to be made available to farmers, traders and processors both large and small.

Expected Outcomes

  • Develop a tech solution to enable farmers to:
    • Model comprehensive data on agricultural practices, soil health, land use to facilitate data-driven decision-making on farm carbon measurement & sequestration potential
    • Measure the effectiveness of end to end supply chain interventions in reducing carbon emissions and – where relevant – enhancing carbon sequestration
  • Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by the end of the project (TRL6); evidence of a minimum of TRL5 required on open call application. However, aspiration is for a close to market ready solution due to the quality of the data provided by the Testbed.

Data availability

Lincolnshire farm produce are providing their data to the testbed through their existing data platforms (including Omnia) which covers not only own farms but also third party land management agreement, packing facilities, haulage and exports. Farm and supply chain data will be ingested & aggregated from the participating farms management tools by the F&D testbed to provide a real-life assessment of the baseline carbon performance of the end to end Agri-food supply chain ready for leveraging by the challenge winner.

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