If your emissions intensity sits well for your system, it is a figure from your own records that you can bring to a buyer when you are talking about supplying a premium market. It is equally something to point to when you are making the case for why your operation should be treated as a preferred supplier. Intensity relates what you emit to what you produce, which makes it a productivity read as well as an emissions one. It will not win that conversation by itself, but it puts something concrete on the table in place of a feeling you hope lands.
Most producers first complete a report because a bank or a buyer asked for one. Those two are usually working with your gross and net emissions, which feed into their own reporting, and intensity is the figure that speaks to how your own business runs. Once the report is sitting in front of you, the ways it gets used have something in common, which is that each one attaches to something you were already doing.
The buyer conversation is one of them, and the yearly review is another. If an account manager goes through your books with you each year, or comes out for an annual visit, the emissions report can come into that same conversation in place of needing a meeting of its own. Some producers now do exactly that. It becomes one more page in a picture that is already on the table. The comparison Ruminati supports today is your own figure from one year to the next, so the page on the table is last year’s result next to this year’s. The question for that meeting is whether your emissions are moving the way you want them to, which is the same question you would put to your costs or your yields.
For some producers the use is more modest again. It is simply having a figure that sits next to everything else they follow from year to year, whether that is production, costs, rainfall, pasture or whatever else matters on the property. Some are building out a broader farm system, with accounting software, farm management tools and emissions data brought into one picture. For them the report is another input to that system, and a job that no longer stands on its own.
Underneath all of that, the report is still a look at where your emissions come from and whether they are heading in a direction you are happy with. From what we have seen, the producers who keep using their report are running operations of every size and complexity. What they share is a reason to open it that goes beyond the request that started it.
