Starting in the 2009 growing season, the Kellogg company deployed the Keystone Field-print calculator within a community of 22 maize growers covering almost 40,000 acres in Nebraska USA. These growers supply a local mill which in turn supplies maize "grits" or pieces each of which becomes one Corn Flake.
Our study confirmed the already efficient and low impact of maize growing system including low till, high yield and large scale economies, and the national improvement seen in the last 2 decades. It highlighted an opportunity to better understand variability of water use, source and impact, and nitrogen use efficiency, this being a dominant driver of greenhouse gas impact. Our continued work with growers and the mill enables ongoing data capture through the 2010 and 2011 growing seasons help to build this understanding and we seek to work further with USDA extension to interpret and leverage it. We also seek to partner with a state university in order to access their agronomic skills and relationships with farmers, in order to help farmers become more even more economically and environmentally effective, and build capacity in their communities.
We carried out this study as a pilot with Keystone Field to Market, with whom we have worked since 2008 in both technical and steering capacities to build the Fieldprint Calculator and its future development path . We see this project ongoing without specific end date and extending scope to Biodiversity, Broader water impact, and potentially soil carbon sequestration opportunity, as well as a successful pilot to apply the tool and model to other crops in other parts of the US and the rest of world.
The Keystone Fieldprint Calculator is free to use and can be accessed at the following URL
http://www.fieldtomarket.org/
