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September 2023 - xFarm Technologies, a tech company that aims to digitize the agribusiness sector, and consulting firm dss+ announce a partnership with the goal of bringing to market new solutions for reporting emissions related to agribusiness production, including those of Scope 3. This type of indirect emissions, from activities along the supply chain, until now represented the unsurpassed hurdle toward full transparency and sustainability of production.
Attention to sustainability is growing, both on the part of companies, which are beginning to understand its strategic value in the short and long term, and on the part of end customers who are increasingly attentive to rewarding realities that prove virtuous. Especially in the world of agrifood production, therefore, companies are increasingly moving toward reducing emissions. xFarm Technologies, thanks to the design support of dss+, now stands by their side. Indeed, quantifying emissions can help increase the efficiency of companies, reduce their environmental impact and obtain products with greater added value.
According to Kraft-Heinz's 2021 ESG report, purpose 3 emissions account for more than 90 percent of the company's total emissions (1). In this context, Agriculture 4.0 technologies can play an important role in both monitoring and reduction.
"As reported in the GreenHouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol), scope 1 emissions are generated from sources directly controlled by the company, such as machinery used for raw material processing or packaging. Scope 2 emissions, on the other hand, are indirect GHG emissions associated with the production of electricity acquired by the company from third parties. Finally, there are scope 3 emissions, which are the most difficult to track because they are the result of activities that are not owned or controlled by the company, but are nonetheless related to the production and transportation of raw materials. For agribusinesses, these are largely generated by farms through processing, use of fertilizers and plant protection products." - comments Matteo Peyron, Sustainability Manager at dss+.
What are the consequences of these emissions? As the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere increases, so does global temperature and climate uncertainty. Since the 1980s, each decade has seen an increase in temperatures until 2011-2020, the hottest on record. So we need to take action: climate change and increasingly frequent extreme weather events are among the causes of food insecurity, and a comprehensive effort is needed to protect agricultural production. If emissions are not reduced, the risk is of an increasingly hostile climate and less and less productive agriculture (2) .
Thanks to theapp for farm management developed by xFarm Technologies and the dss+ sustainability calculation algorithms, every farm has a detailed and timely database from which to easily extract all the information needed to calculate the emissions related to its crops. Through the platform, it is possible to keep track of all the activities carried out on the farm, automatically recording each agricultural operation, accompanied by its fuel consumption but also by the amounts of fertilizers and plant protection products used. This important information (in English called "farm level insights") can then be used directly by the farmer, or shared with the entire agribusiness chain. "If indeed the intention is to halve our emissions by 2030, as indicated by Agenda 2030, we need to understand on which aspects we can act most effectively. Only with the digitization of agrifood supply chains can we obtain clear and objective data that will allow us to understand where and how to intervene. Together with dss+, we are already working with important Italian and international agribusinesses, such as Tomato Farm, Andriani, Molini Pivetti and Cereal Docks. The goal in the coming years is to support more and more realities on this path toward increasingly sustainable production." - comments Giovanni Causapruno, Head of B2B at xFarm Technologies.
Thanks to 4.0 tools, farmers have a way to record in the farm notebook, in a fully automated way, the activities performed on the farm. The collected data, which is extremely accurate, makes it possible to produce an increasingly accurate estimate of thecarbon footprint of individual agrifood products. Specifically, through the platform xFarm Analytics, agrifood companies can consult data uploaded independently by farmers or coming directly from sensors placed in the field in real time, so as to have the pulse of the entire supply chain always in real time. With the Sustainability module, a dedicated function within the platform xFarm, thespecific environmental impact of all activities and the globalimpact of the supply chain can finally be calculated.
Sources
(1) Kraft-Heinz ESG Report 2022
(2) United Nations, Effects of Climate Change.
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