FARM Environmental Stewardship Begins Version 2
March 4, 2020
FARM Environmental Stewardship officially transitioned to ‘Version 2’ at the end of February, updating its greenhouse gas and including new data points.
Accompanying the new version of FARM ES will be an updated User Guide and an online training to be released before the end of Q1.
The three main categories of major changes coming in FARM ES Version 2 include new data options and questions, new crop emissions factors that update baseline information, and more detailed results, such as the ability to see greenhouse gas results broken down by type of gas.
If previous data under the first version of FARM ES represents a coop/processor ‘baseline’ of GHG emissions, FARM recommends and is able to re-run the old data using Version 2 of the model. Typically, GHG reporting guidance recommends re-running the ‘base year’ of data if methodology updates will significantly impact results. In such cases, the crop emissions factors updates do change the ‘feed production’ portion of the GHG emissions. Participants who choose not to re-run baseline data should note in any external GHG reporting that subsequent years were calculated using different methods than the baseline year.