Truterra Ohio Wheat Project
Truterra leverages its ag retailer (cooperatives and independent dealers) network to advance sustainable agricultural practices at scale and support farmers making practice changes. In Ohio, Heritage Cooperative and Mercer Landmark Cooperative deliver services, programs and access to stewardship insights and improvement opportunities to their customer growing wheat and other row crops. There are no specific improvement targets, rather the focus is to enable farmers to analyze improvement opportunities on a field-by-field basis. Seven KPIs are used to track progress on the ground including: Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Nitrogen Use Efficiency, Soil Quality Trends, Wind Erosion, Sheet and Rill Erosion, Conservation Practices Deployed and Truterra™ Sustainability Score.
Engagement Targets
Notes: (1) Minor fluctuations in the number of retained growers is expected from year to year. These fluctuations may be due to year-over-year crop rotation effects or other factors beyond the control of the project. Enrolled acres represent the total number of acres on an individual farm in a specific year. The ability to report enrolled acres is based on the Fieldprint Project Standard requirement that individual growers enrolled in projects enter at least 10% of the acres managed for a specific crop. (2) Entered acres represent the actual number of enrolled acres for which data is entered in the Fieldprint Platform for analysis.
Objectives
In 2022, the project supported 50 growers with wheat in field rotation in Ohio to document sustainability performance on 54,490 acres.
The share of no-till (45%) and conservation tillage (48%) on the enrolled acres remains high, even though there was some increase in conventional tillage in OH due to crop rotation (more acres planted with corn, fewer acres planted with wheat and soybeans than prior year). The adoption rate of cover crops is at 12%. 28% of all enrolled fields have at least 1 conservation practice implemented, some have multiple practices, with a slight increase in total practices (4) from prior year on the retained fields.
There was a high rate of use of nutrient management plans (88%, up 8.1% from prior year) and variable application technology for fertilizers (80%, up 3.3%) on the retained fields.
Truterra tracks 5 categories of pest management. The advanced and basic integrated pest management comprise 29% on the enrolled acres and 43% on the retained acres, respectively. There was an increase in basic pest management usage on the retained acres from 22% to 58%.