Advancing Stewardship

BY GLEN LIFORD

GreenPoint Ag Sustain collaborates with Cotton Incorporated to connect consumer brands to sources of sustainable cotton.

GreenPoint Ag has announced a new collaboration with Cotton Incorporated, a not-for-profit research and marketing company representing upland cotton, to advance the adoption of sustainable farming practices across 50,000 acres of cotton in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas.

GreenPoint Ag will participate in the collaboration through its partnership with Truterra, LLC, the sustainability business at Land O’Lakes, Inc., one of America’s largest farmer-owned cooperatives. The initiative will help connect consumer brands to verified sources of sustainable cotton in their supply chains. Truterra and GreenPoint Ag will work with participating cotton growers to establish an environmental sustainability baseline for each field, identify year-over-year improvement opportunities, and model the impact of various conservation practices on sustainability and profitability. These efforts will help participating growers measure and improve water quality, land use, soil conservation, soil carbon, irrigation water use, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, and energy use on their cotton fields.

Truterra and GreenPoint Ag will also help participating growers enroll in the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol, a comprehensive program of verification against environmental benchmarks that connects consumer brands to sustainably grown cotton in their supply chains.

“Consumers are demanding more transparencyabout the practices used to grow and make products, whether they’re on the dinner plate or hanging in closets,” said Jason Weller, Vice President, Truterra, LLC. “At Truterra, we are committed to working with growers across the country to unlock the enormous untapped value and potential in the market for sustainability. This new collaboration expands our footprint into a new crop – cotton – and offers cotton growers a comprehensive view of all of the factors impacting the profitability, performance, and sustainability of their farm business to enable them to not only meet consumer demand, but to make even smarter business decisions.”

Initially, the program will work with growers to analyze 2020 agronomic data and generate sustainability insights that can be incorporated into the growers’ production decisions throughout the early spring months in advance of the 2021 harvest season. Truterra and Cotton Incorporated will look to expand the project to include additional acres in 2021.

For the past three years, the GreenPoint AG has offered growers of soybeans, corn, and cotton the opportunity to enroll in the Sustain program, which allows them to begin compiling data detailing their management, irrigation, and conservation practices on a field-by-field basis.

“The program allows us to help growers build a baseline from which farmers can document their sustainability efforts and create a customized plan for how they operate and their goals,” says Green- Point Ag Customer Service Assistant Manager & Sustain Lead Savanna Cox. “Many of the farmers who have enrolled are already doing a good job and just want to keep it up. Others are improving their practices.”

The program utilizes the powerful Truterra™ Insights Engine. After the grower’s information is entered, a report can be created for each field that identifies options for improvement and helps farmers plan scenarios across a variety of steward activities. It identifies products, practices, and technologies to match conditionson each acre. The tool evaluates five key stewardship indicators to help farmers make their decisions: Nitrogen use efficiency, sheet and rill erosion, wind erosion, soil quality trend, and net GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions.

“It essentially quantifies these efforts in a way that’s easy to understand,” says Cox. “We can then estimate the potential return on investment for these choices.”

Cox says this will become an important tool in the future as consumers continue to demand more information about where their grains and fiber come from. Our goal is to take the grower’s story and translate it so consumers can understand and relate.

“Our growers want to protect the land, and they want their children and grandchildren to be able to farm it in the future,” she says. “This effort is good for the farmer and good for the land and makes the consumers happy, too. It’s not too early to get started.”

Farmers who are interested in GreenPoint Ag Sustain should visit https://www. greenpointag.com/ sustainability for more information on how to enroll or contact your local Co-op Agronomist who can facilitate the conversation with GreenPoint Ag.