Building Trust: The Role of MRV in the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund
By Rowan Collins, Field Operations Specialist
With fall field checks beginning next week, it's important to highlight the role of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) in ensuring our enrolled farmers are producing environmental outcomes that can be quantified and verified. This process not only builds trust with our funding partners but also provides valuable insights for our farmers as we collectively work to build economic and environmental sustainability in agriculture. Here's why MRV matters and how it benefits everyone involved.
What is MRV?
MRV stands for Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification, and it forms the backbone of the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund. Essentially, this process allows us to:
Monitor key indicators like soil organic carbon levels, cover crop ratings, percent of residue cover, and more. Increasing soil organic carbon levels improve soil health, water retention, food production, and resilience to drought, but it also decreases greenhouse gasses through soil sequestration.
Report these findings accurately to our participating farmers, funding partners, and regulatory bodies to ensure transparency and accountability.
Verify the outcomes we claim—such as improved water quality and reduced carbon emissions. By working with third-party experts to validate the results we report, we ensure that our claims are reliable and based on rigorous assessment methodologies.
Why MRV is Crucial
Larger Payments for Farmers
The higher the quality of our MRV, the more accurately we can document and predict the environmental benefits of sustainable practices. This allows us to unlock larger payments for farmers participating in SWOF. Our robust MRV protocol allows us to deliver meaningful results to our funding partners, setting SWOF apart from less rigorous programs.Valuable Insights for Farmers
Our data-driven approach empowers farmers and landowners with valuable information about their farm’s progress. This helps farmers make informed decisions about land management practices and enables them to maximize the benefits of our program while improving their bottom line.Compliance with USDA Climate-Smart Funding
Our MRV process ensures that SWOF remains compliant with USDA Climate-Smart Agriculture funding guidelines. These government funds are a critical part of the payments we pass on to farmers, and maintaining compliance is essential to keeping the program financially viable for all parties involved.Improving Environmental Models
Finally, the data collected through MRV is used to improve the predictive models that calculate the environmental outcomes of conservation practices. This means that, over time, we can offer even more accurate estimates and potentially increase future payments for farmers enrolled in the program.
A Iowa field enrolled with SWOF during a field visit in October of 2023.
A Review of SWOF’s Field Verification Process:
A SWOF staff member will step foot in every field under contract with SWOF at least once, sometimes twice. If a producer has reduced their tillage and planted a winter kill cover crop species, such as oats or radishes, a SWOF staff member would visit this field once in the fall to confirm the cover crop and then again in the spring to make sure no tillage took place. If a producer has only planned a tillage change on a field or will be implementing an over-wintering cover crop, such as cereal rye, the field is visited just once in the spring.
What happens during a SWOF field visit?
SWOF has developed a verification app to ensure all information is efficiently gathered. The app walks each staff member through questions on crop type, tillage type, cover crop emergence, and a few other details. Two photos of the field that are geo-tagged are also taken. This simply means we know the exact location and direction the photos are taken from to ensure field location accuracy. Each field visit is short and to the point. Most farmers won’t even realize we were there.
MRV is not anything enrolled farmers should fear—it's a tool that ensures fairness, builds trust with supply chain investors, and helps you better understand the environmental impact of your farming practices. And at SWOF, we understand the complexity of farming and the unknowns it holds. If a contract amendment is needed, we can work on that with you. Please reach out with any questions about field visits and thank you for being a key partner in driving sustainable agricultural practices forward.
Rowan Collins
Field Operations Specialist
As a Field Operations Specialist, Rowan provides critical support services to the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund team. He works as a lead on our field compliance checks in the fall and spring, collects soil and water samples, and assists our Field Team with farmer enrollment when needed. He graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture. Rowan is originally from Grimes, Iowa and enjoys sports and working outside.