The data problem sitting behind most Scope 3 reporting

There's an assumption that sits underneath a lot of the conversation about emissions reporting in agriculture: that the friction is mostly on the producer's side, and once producers are measuring, the rest of the chain can get on with using the data. It's a reasonable enough assumption from the outside. From inside a sustainability or ESG function at a processor, retailer or bank, it looks a bit different.

The reporting obligations landing on these teams have moved fast over the past couple of years: mandatory sustainability disclosure, Scope 3 accounting, investor and board scrutiny that didn't exist in the same form five years ago. Most of the people doing this work weren't hired for compliance reporting specifically. They were hired to run sustainability strategy, manage supplier relationships, or lead procurement, and reporting has become a much larger share of that role than the job description probably suggested.

The part that gets less attention is how much of that burden is downstream of a data problem. Getting consistent, comparable emissions data from a supplier base of producers who each measure things slightly differently, if they measure at all, is genuinely hard. It isn't a matter of asking and having numbers arrive. It's chasing, following up, reconciling formats, and often still ending up with a data set that's incomplete or inconsistent enough to make reporting on it a stretch.

That's the problem Ruminati is built to solve from the producer end: applying a consistent, standardised calculation methodology so the numbers coming back are comparable, whether they're from a hundred hectare mixed farm or a large-scale feedlot, aggregated in one place rather than arriving as forty different spreadsheets. It doesn't remove the reporting obligation sitting with a processor or retailer. It does mean the underlying data isn't the obstacle it currently is for a lot of teams.

If you're working through what Scope 3 data collection looks like for your supply chain, the team is at hello@ruminati.com.au.