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USFRA report navigates the maze of food and agriculture metrics

Farmers and ranchers are being asked to report more farm-level data to food companies than ever before. In a new report, US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance (USFRA) is calling for a new approach to benefit farmers and ranchers and food companies.

Ellie Moss helped create the report for USFRA.

“USFRA wanted to do this report because in so many of the conversations that we were having with both farmers and ranchers and food companies, metrics were coming up as a sort of pain point,” she says. “People were acknowledging that the collection of farm-level data and then having that get reported through the supply chain has been really difficult for everyone involved.”  

The demand for farm data is driven by the request for more transparency in food production from consumers, investors, nongovernmental organizations. But this often means more work for farmers and ranchers.

There are more than 16 agriculture and food metric initiatives to guide reporting.

“Both farmers and ranchers and food companies have a lot at stake with the current metric system and are wishing to respond to the pressures that are coming for more information, but the way that the systems are set up today that just a very difficult and expensive thing to do,” she says.

The USFRA report highlights ways to lower the burden…“One is that we can streamline and integrate metrics better so that we don’t have as much duplication, but at the end of the day it’s unlikely that everyone will agree to use the same metrics, so I think what we need to do is look to technology to help address these challenges,” she says. “The ideal situation that we heard from a number of people is a system where farmers and ranchers could put in there data once and then technology would enable it to be transformed and reported out in as many formats as were needed to as many people that were demanding it.”

The report also highlighted specific actions that can be taken including: getting on the same page about who owns the data, having data flow in more than one direction, sharing the risk and reward, making the relationship between companies and farmers more of a partnership, and engaging the whole system for great collaboration.

The report can be found at usfarmersandranchers.org.

Audio: Ellie Moss for US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance

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