The commodity crop supply chain set aggressive farm sustainability goals that field-level programs need help to meet. Here's the challenge, and how FieldRise helps existing sustainability programs cover more ground faster at a fraction of today's per-acre time and cost.
Welcome to FieldRise
Growing Healthier Together
Why We're Here
FieldRise gives farm and food chain leaders a better way to measure farm practices and overcome obstacles to reaching sustainability goals.
Consumers are asking more questions. However, defining sustainability remains elusive. Food chain leaders work in a complex landscape that requires measuring farm sustainability, speeding practice and outcome progress, and proving supply chain programs work. However, farmer participation and stakeholder acceptance can be poles apart. Most farmers haven’t seen benefits in being measured. Many farmers - and food chain managers - see measurement options that are redundant, costly, time-intensive, and identify problems but lack solutions. Valuable sustainability opportunities lie fallow.
The FieldRise program brings people together in a powerful program that overcomes those challenges.
FieldRise works.
Growing Healthier Together
On Thanksgiving 2014, 12 U.S. farmer organizations Spun off FieldRise LLC as a private corporation, launching one of the most powerful sustainability measurement programs serving the food chain.
Our mission is to foster a fresh approach to recognizing farmer dedication to improving economics, strengthening communities, protecting natural resources and meeting the field-to-family need for continued sustainability progress.
FieldRise launched on Thanksgiving because gratitude is a good start for a new company dedicated to helping the harvest continue and reach more tables.
Our pilot phase - as The National Initiative For Sustainable Agriculture - became 1,000 farmers strong, covered more than one million acres and included 11 field and direct-consumed crops. As more organizations join FieldRise, we’ll accelerate that success.
And we'll work throughout the food chain to team up and grow healthier together.
Moving Mindsets: Inspiring Action
FieldRise’s 12 founding farmer organizations have proven that sustainability knowledge is power. The organizations’ members have found the data invaluable as a source of information to help continue stewardship advances. The data also anchor marketing and public affairs programs that encourage powerful action, in addition to securing recognition. The data has proven successful in:
- Enrolling food product buyers as sustainability partners, improving the program’s effectiveness.
- Providing newsworthy information and interview sources, and helping associations motivate other farmers to improve practices, increase profits and protect natural resources.
- Encouraging farmers about how well they are doing, making sustainability a positive.
- Grounding sustainability progress.
Envisioning a Sustainable Future
Because food ranks a close third behind air and water as key to life itself, ensuring a dependable supply stands above all other sustainability priorities.
Farmers know achieving that goal brings challenges at every turn. That's because agriculture benefits and side effects reach into every corner of the environment, throughout culture, and even into spiritual traditions. Connections with food run deep and wide. Food is a literal connection to the sun, soil, air and rain. Decades after immigrant families merge into their new country, they still cook meals from generations past. Concerns about farm practices and food guide grocery selections, fuel ideologies, and pour millions into political campaigns. Statistics about how many people we need to feed just a few years from now are frequently mentioned in marketing and policy materials. Unfortunately, conversations about food sustainability sometimes bring more heat than light.
Our role is to help change the conversation about food production and advance food chain sustainability from the ground up.
FieldRise is rooted in a belief that farmers have millennia of proof that agriculture continually advances. Farmers produced enough food for about 1.5 billion people in 1900 and nearly 7.5 billion today. And while farming shares historic blemishes with most other industries, farmer values, hard work and technology empower ongoing sustainability advancements. Recent USDA data show tremendous progress in farm stewardship, long before "sustainably" became a strategy imperative in other industries. But success must be surpassed by ongoing progress, not just on farms, but also in every way food touches people, profit and planet.
The FieldRise team knows measuring farm progress and supporting proactive food-chain sustainability programs can't solve food sustainability challenges. But we can help.
Speeding Sustainability Success
FieldRise Partnership Planning Finds Common Ground:
We bring farmers and the food chain together in a new way that works better. Our consulting and creative planning program combines agronomic and behavioral change strategies to get farmers, buyers, manufacturers - and the people asking tough questions --together in a safe place. Then we surprise everyone by showing it’s actually possible to meet everyone’s needs in realistic ways.
FieldRise Frontier Program Speeds Outcome Progress:
- An easy online (or paper) survey measures farm practices.
- Our client-branded online survey portal and email invitation system streamlines outreach and data collection.
- An innovative peer-reviewed analytics process ensures iron-clad objectivity.
- Farmers get customized FieldRise Frontier reports showing where they rank with their peers, help for their specific needs, and an ROI.
- Clients get powerful internal data that increase cost efficiency and external data to prove success.
- Repeat surveys document practice and outcome progress.
The FieldRise Program: Simple and Powerful
The FieldRise program is as powerful as it is simple. No other measurement system comes close in farmer acceptance, ease of use and data validity. Our measurement system documents success today and empowers realistic continuous improvement throughout the food chain.
How FieldRise Works
- Farmer associations and the supply chain support the program, and individual farmers pay nothing.
- A voluntary online questionnaire asks about sustainability practices. It takes about one slow cup of coffee to finish the crop-specific and whole-farm sections. All personal answers are confidential.
- The questionnaires can be custom designed for each sponsoring association to meet the needs of different crops and regions.
- Sponsor associations get unbiased data to use with farmers, food companies, media or consumers -- to document practices today and to encourage continued improvements.
- Repeating the assessment shows progress over time.
- Food companies can draw from association data to show their customers that their farm supply chain is on the right track.
The FieldRise Mission
Accelerated Sustainability Success
Today, more people are asking questions about how food is produced and how it reaches their tables. Questions center on safety, protecting the environment, growing the economy, and supporting communities. FieldRise was founded by farmers to help the food chain answer those questions based on field-level facts. We help the food chain advance sustainability from the ground up in several ways:
- Measuring farm practices through easy, online questionnaires that measure practice adoption.
- Analytics using a novel and peer-reviewed statistical process that ensures iron-clad objectivity.
- Pinpointing what's working well and where progress can move the food chain forward faster.
- Accelerating outcome progress by tapping into FieldRise’s government and NGO partners to bring new resources into farmer and food chain programs.
- Connecting farmers with the food chain and their customers based on objective information.
- Validating that food chain managers are making a measureable difference with the money they invest in their programs.
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I want to see how I’m doing and make sure my information stays private. FieldRise’s questionnaire was very easy to complete. They suggested how to...
Andy Wallendal
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Some farm sectors point to 30 years of excellent sustainability results, but what happened before doesn’t address today’s need to keep getting bet...
Brian Flood, Ph.D.
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We’re seeing increasing need for farmers to know where they stand and to get new ideas to continue improvements. We offered the program to Illinois ...
Ron Moore
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Featured Articles
Hot off the FieldRise PressFeatured News
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1Webinar invitation: Rethinking Food Chain Sustainability Measurement from the Ground UpThe FieldRise team is hosting a webinar on July 1 at 2 PM or July 14 at 2 PM Central Time that we h...
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2FieldRise Webinars Showcase Soybean Stewardship Success
FieldRise hosted two Webinars in late April attended by soybean industry leaders from state and nati...
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3Webinar – How Soybean Farmers are Teaming up to Define SustainabilityWebinar Options/Dates Please join Checkoff/ASA/QSSB leaders from throughout the U...
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4Cranberry Institute Becomes FieldRise Network Founder
Please join the FieldRise Network in welcoming the Cranberry Institute as a new Network member! Th...
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