Denim brand Wrangler® report with farm-management software company, MyFarms℠, explaining how field-level sustainability data can be used to strengthen business relationships and results in agricultural supply chains. Wrangler simultaneously announced it will offer 125 MyFarms subscriptions to U.S. cotton growers to make it easier for them to measure and report their sustainability data.
“From Burden to Benefit: Sustainability Data in the Agricultural Supply Chain” is the second paper in the Wrangler Science & Conservation series. It shares best practices for protecting data privacy and leveraging data analysis to advance common goals shared by growers, brands, and other links in the supply chain. The paper draws on Wrangler’s experience in the cotton supply chain to share learnings relevant to other food and fiber industries, including how to build trust with growers, and how to align the business interests of different links in the supply chain.
“Farmers work diligently to bring a cotton crop to harvest each year and their challenges are many,” said Roian Atwood, sustainability director for Wrangler. “As an apparel manufacturer, Wrangler wants to improve the environmental performance of our products. But to ask growers to make an additional effort to track and share farm-level data, we need to try to create something of value for them in return. That’s what we’re attempting to do with the MyFarms software.”
MyFarms is cloud-based software that helps growers make crop-management decisions by allowing them to anonymously compare their performance with their peers on metrics like average erosion rate and energy-use efficiency through integration of sustainability metrics from the Fieldprint® Platform—a pioneering sustainability assessment framework developed by Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture. Other features include automated calculators to save growers time in determining how much seed, fertilizer and spray to purchase for their fields; hourly rainfall and wind speed data; and precision agriculture map analysis.
“The MyFarms platform was built by farmers for farmers to make their jobs easier and more profitable,” said MyFarms Founder and Managing Director, Chris Fennig. “In funding the expansion of our data exchange to cotton growers, Wrangler has effectively gifted the industry with a powerful foundation for tracking and measuring both environmental outcomes and financial benefits.”
Wrangler funded the development of the cotton-grower interface on MyFarms, including a feature that will make it quicker and easier for cotton growers to measure their sustainability performance and operational efficiency utilizing Field to Market’s embedded sustainability metrics. Both Wrangler and MyFarms are members of Field to Market, and as a qualified data management partner, MyFarms uses the science-based metric outcomes data generated by the Fieldprint® Platform to quantify the environmental impact of cotton production for Wrangler, while returning valuable production insights to farmers. The 125 MyFarms subscriptions will be available for the 2018 harvest season to cotton growers involved with numerous U.S. cotton initiatives, including e3 growers, Better Cotton Initiative (USA), Texas Alliance for Water Conservation and others.
“We’re excited to see the results of this software integration, particularly the support for cotton farmers through a seamless solution to measure the sustainability performance and efficiency of their operations by harnessing the sustainability metrics of the Fieldprint Platform,” said Rod Snyder, President of Field to Market. “Wrangler understands how important it is to reduce the reporting burden for farmers, and in the process they could be creating a wealth of new knowledge and opportunities for the entire supply chain.”
