Technology providers have been working for years to develop platforms with the capability to track and verify low carbon-intensity (CI) farming practices. They are innovating to help connect farm data with ethanol producers, aggregating the intel needed to accurately estimate CI scores of crops and the fuels derived from them.
As 45Z comes into effect in 2025, offering ethanol producers monetary return for lowering their CI scores, there is an opportunity to pass that value on to farmers utilizing regenerative ag practices, a standout method of significantly reducing CI scores. However, to connect the dots between field and fuel, crop data must be accurately collected and compiled for verification and compliance. Several options are already on the market for farmers looking for ways to track, verify and share their data with ethanol producers.
Incite.ag
Preston Brown, president and founder of Incite.ag, was an Illinois farm kid, the inspiration behind his pursuit of agronomy. Now, his company helps biofuel producers understand their fuel scores and how to source low-CI feedstocks.
Brown explains that when the business was started four years ago, the technology was a harder sell for ethanol producers. “If you’re bringing a disruptive software solution to an ethanol plant, saying, ‘Hey, we can measure your fuel CI on a more real-time basis—we can give you dynamic feedstock scoring and leverage tools for that.’ There’s a lot of plants that would say ‘That’s interesting,’ but at the end of the day, you know, do they need it?” For pioneering early adopters, the answer was “yes,” but opportunities provided by the potential credits from 45Z have increased the number of interested biofuel producers—those who were waiting for a “clear value proposition.”
Brown says most ethanol producers have not yet had public, commercial-scale feedstock CI scoring conversations with their feedstock suppliers, and developing relationships while introducing a new conversation around data capture takes time. “There is a tremendous amount of education and enablement, trust building and process creation that needs to be implemented,” he says. “Refining these elements is critical to be able to capture the volume of data that you need for scoring and then ultimately compliance. When you execute all those steps effectively, you maximize the most important element of all: buy-in from all those individual corn suppliers.
”Incite.ag uses a “boots in the dirt” operating philosophy, collaborating with the ethanol plant’s origination team to help farmers input their data into Incite.ag’s program. That could include a straightforward sync of data between the farmer’s management software system and Incite.ag’s system, or a more manual approach. Incite.ag’s system can automatically connect with a farmer’s management software, extract and map the data, then generate a CI score.
The value proposition for Incite.ag’s software is its ability to automatically share farm data, capture ethanol plant information and share it with a third-party compliance organization, Brown explains.
“At the end of the day, we’re helping plants get ready,” he says. “We’re helping producers to get the education and enablement they need to be able to ramp up into CI scoring, because you just can’t flip the switch and start maximizing value. It takes a stair-step approach.”
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Katie Schroeder
Contributions Editor BBI International
Incite.ag guides producers across the agricultural supply chain to Turn Emissions into Income. Incite.ag’s CI scoring system unlocks novel revenue streams and empowers producers to take control of their unique CI Scores. Learn more by hitting the link below or reach out to the team directly at success@incite.ag or 815.373.0177.
