Using collaboration and community-centered design to evolve open-source technology for agricultural impact monitoring
Written by Lauren Dunteman. Edited by Tim Tensen and our partners at OpenTEAM.
“It’s not the cow, it’s the how ‘’ is a catchy phrase that I caught onto in grad school which speaks to the important impact that our management decisions have on the land. The phrase has been popularized by organizations like Sacred Cow and the Savory Institute to challenge a dominant but contested assumption in the industry that raising cattle automatically has a negative impact on the environment. The phrase instead encourages the conversation to be more nuanced, acknowledging that the way cattle are raised has a much stronger influence than the presence of the cattle themselves. Put simply, it proposes that raising cattle is not automatically good or bad for the environment, and the approach, instead, is what need be debated.
There are a lot of strong opinions about how we manage lands today. Consumers, producers, land owners, corporations, conservation orgs, etc. all hold opinions about (or argue that we don’t really know) how to steward the environment. Some argue that there is an inevitable impact of beef that can only be avoided by cutting cattle out of our food system entirely. Others are emboldened by the potential that regenerative grazing management can shift this “inevitable impact” to a positive one. Studies have shown that grazing can regenerate soil and sequester carbon, but to what degree this is possible, and in which places, remains a question. The industry is seeing a strong need to clarify the impact that management decisions have on the land by collecting clear, robust, and standardized data. Corporations need more data to better understand their sourcing impact; conservation and research organizations want quality data to better analyze and understand the relationship between ecosystem health and herd management; ag tech companies and other service providers aim to respond to these needs by bringing a multitude of currently incompatible data solutions to the marketplace.
And amongst all of the commotion and conflicting opinions on what is “best”, producers are stuck right in the middle.
As the industry seeks to better understand the impact that grazing has on the environment, we aren’t just faced with a fun technical challenge, but one that has notable social and cultural considerations as well. To come up with technical solutions without addressing aspects like legacy, culture, and governance would be to take a fragmented approach. We often see initiatives fail because they are designed by a few technical “experts” for the many, and in the process, the perspectives of the many are not reconciled.
The phrase “It’s not the cow, it’s the how” encourages us to consider that our process has an outsized influence over the effects of our work. Therefore, the process in which these complex questions are addressed needs to be thoughtfully considered.
Those who have been following my professional career know I hold two working principles close to heart:
- Collaborate with others
- Center the leadership of communities
These principles are why I was so enthusiastic to begin working with Terra Genesis back in 2020. Terra Genesis is an international design firm that works at the intersection of agriculture, ecology, and marketplaces to uplift regenerative agriculture. Terra Genesis equally prioritizes social and environmental outcomes, noting that a living system cannot regenerate without simultaneously impacting a place and the people that call it home. To achieve this aim, Terra Genesis centers farming communities in the design of regenerative sourcing programs, something that has been particularly important to me given my upbringing as a farm kid in rural Illinois. These programs mutually benefit buyers across both food and fashion industries by increasing the transparency of their sourcing programs and helping to improve their sourcing impact.
In my career, I have developed an unexpected interest in data. My academic studies leaned more towards the qualitative essence of systems-based change, yet through my work in industry, the importance of credibly quantifying impact has become evident. Monitoring, verifying, and reporting against eco-social impacts is an emergent and complicated space that the industry is working to grapple with. It requires nuanced approaches and evolving technologies.
Many people acknowledge Terra Genesis’s work as one that weaves an important thread between the qualitative soft sciences (e.g. relationship development and sociocultural reconciliation) with the quantitative hard sciences (e.g. technology, data, and research). It is this balance that has helped me grow as a professional and enables our team to contribute to complex, systems-level change.
Terra Genesis’s emphasis on science and technology has been very intentional. To some extent, the industry has been taking shots in the dark, with organizations hoping to shift their impact without really understanding what is happening on the ground. The carbon modeling space, for example, has over-promised by placing the potential of the carbon economy before the science and technology to credibly verify those changes. In order to maintain credibility in an industry where “regenerative” is not — and I argue shouldn’t be — rigidly defined, science and data are needed to credibly communicate the ways in which ecosystems evolve. Terra Genesis advocates for open-source technology, especially in the agricultural sector where the barrier to accessing agricultural technologies can be prohibitively high for different entity sizes and types.
To uplift these values, Terra Genesis has been a long-standing member of a community called Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management (OpenTEAM). OpenTEAM convenes diverse stakeholder groups to collaboratively address shared technological and data-related issues in the agricultural sector, the goal being to support farmer viability, establish thriving ecosystems, and create vibrant communities through access to scientifically-based, data-driven, and regenerative technologies. Their approach resonates strongly with a framework by the Movement Strategy Center that I have used regularly throughout my professional career, which illuminates the necessary paradigm shift in how communities are engaged in projects.
The work of OpenTEAM aims to empower communities and stakeholders to design solutions for themselves; this approach is as uncommon as it is essential to creating accessible and equitable technology solutions in the agricultural sector.
This embodies a necessary paradigm shift, one which transitions away from the common approach of using listening sessions as a means to consult with diverse stakeholders towards using a process that actually places the leadership in their hands. This paradigm of community engagement has been an approach that strongly resonates with Terra Genesis’s values as well.
OpenTEAM holds years of experience engaging stakeholders in this way. They host “Collabathons”, which are sustained collaborative efforts and virtual design sessions extended to communities impacted by a particular technology gap or other shared problem. Stakeholders often include producers, researchers, service providers, conservation organizations, other non-profits, and corporations. By convening Collabathons, OpenTEAM creates a space for different perspectives from these stakeholder groups to come together and be reconciled. This community of practice resonates with Terra Genesis’s aims to work across difference, place decision-making power in the hands of community members, and address shortcomings in the industry from a systemic perspective.
When addressing systemic issues such as the impact of beef, working in silos is not only ineffective; it is counterproductive.
As a result, system-wide engagement is necessary. Recently, Terra Genesis and OpenTEAM have partnered to co-facilitate a Collabathon in the US beef sector, specifically aimed at addressing the current procedural and data gaps that exist in the carbon monitoring space. In this sector:
- Brands are eager to invest in producer communities for improved grazing practices but don’t yet feel confident about the science that would credibly monitor the impacts of their investments.
- Conservation organizations are eager to better understand the relationship between grazing management decisions and ecosystem impacts but also don’t feel confident about technology’s ability to assess these changes in a standardized way across the varying ecosystems of the United States.
- Producers seem willing to adjust their management practices in alignment with environmental outcomes so long as their thin margins are not eaten up in the process, but proving progress towards environmental outcomes to secure financial support will be challenging until a standardized monitoring process is both established and accessible.
- Policymakers are looking to implement legislation that holds companies accountable to the impact of their business, inclusive of carbon impact, but brands will be unable to meet reporting requirements if they can’t accurately establish a clear understanding of the existing and potential future impacts of their sourcing programs.
All of these aims are blocked by a shared challenge, which is that there is not a standardized way to project and monitor changes in soil carbon as a result of grazing management from one US ecosystem to another:
- The rates at which SOC changes occur under the different management practices in diverse climatic/ pedologic/ topographic conditions is not well understood.
- The gap in management and soils data over time also makes it difficult to understand where the highest potential for soil carbon sequestration is across the US.
- Much of the data collected is considered “gray data” or not of research quality.
This lack of high-resolution management and soil carbon data also inhibits accurate calibration data sets which can be used to improve sample site selection tools, remote sensing machine learning models, and biogeochemical models. The partnership between OpenTEAM and Terra Genesis to convene the Grazing Data Service Collabathon with participation from a diverse stakeholder group of 60+ organizations is identifying various needs for the shared solution, requisite infrastructure, and supporting governance. To learn more about the governance of this Collabathon, including the wide array of organizations that have stewarded and participated in these discussions, keep an eye out for a follow-up blog post by my coworker, Tim Tensen.
The Grazing Data Service Collabathon officially kicked off in the fall of 2023. It has been meaningful to witness diverse stakeholders come together in working groups to discuss their challenges, needs, and aspirations in this space. By engaging with stakeholders across the system, we have begun to map out what system-level changes will need to be considered. With the beef sector already being one of strong opinions, I am eager to continue to communicate across differences and find a shared pathway forward.
