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Q&A With Eric Coronel The APC hired Eric Coronel to be its first sustainability director late last year. Based in Tifton, Georgia, Coronel’s first project is Sustainable U.S. Peanuts.
NPB: What’s your background, and what will you be doing with the APC? I developed a strong interest in the agricultural industry in my early teens. I pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees in environmental science and earned a doctorate in crop sciences from the University of Illinois. My first professional experience out of college was being a research agronomist at the John Deere Technology Innovation Center in Champaign, Illinois. I provided agronomic expertise, conducted data analysis to support business needs and led on-farm research projects across the Midwest. After spending six years in the Midwest working on research topics for corn, I wanted to learn about other cropping systems. In 2018, I was fortunate to join the staff at Field to Market. This organization developed a platform to estimate the environmental footprint of 11 commodity row crops, including peanuts and cotton. At Field to Market, I learned about how a crop supply chain can come together to support farmers and improve the environmental outcomes of agriculture. In 2021, when this position at the APC became available, I knew I wanted to do my best to get the job and help the peanut industry. Under the umbrella name of Sustainable U.S. Peanuts, APC has launched a significant initiative in the form of a grower platform developed by following the template from the cotton industry. The grower platform will use voluntary information entered by farmers to document, verify and communicate the sustainability story of U.S.
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peanuts. A significant part of my work at APC is to promote the grower platform, assist growers in enrolling in the program and share insights from the information collected. I will also gather and share information about the sustainability of peanuts from other sources, such as the National Indicators Report from Field to Market and insights gained from the scientific literature. As the program develops, we want to help connect peanut farmers with carbon markets and other incentives to adopt conservation practices, technologies and best management practices. NPB: What are the benefits of this program to the industry and specifically farmers? Farmers that enter their information into the grower platform are given field-level scores for eight sustainability metrics, including soil erosion, soil carbon, and greenhouse gas emissions per acre and per pound of peanuts harvested. Farmers will also receive state and national benchmarks for five of the eight metrics. It is valuable to know how a farming operation compares to the benchmarks to find areas of improvement and celebrate how well a farmer might be running their farming operation. For the self-assessment questionnaire, farmers will see the aggregate responses from all participants to learn about best practices from across the peanut industry.
