Working Group improves the Cool Farm Tool for Dutch users
In the beginning of 2020, a group of Cool Farm Alliance members from the Netherlands including arable crop producers, trade organizations and BO Akkerbouw joined their forces to create a Dutch working group with the main goal to improve the user experience in the Cool Farm Tool for Dutch users.
Despite the year being marked by Covid-19, 7-8 representatives managed to meet in several virtual meetings. While all of them have different levels of engagement and aspiration for the tool, the representatives could identify a shared desire to make the Cool Farm Tool easier to use, understand and implement for Dutch farmers. “Incomplete or inaccurate translations may not be an issue for people in our environment, but it immediately puts off a potato grower in the far north of this tiny country” says Peter-Erik Ywema, Sustainability Director of Royal Avebe. That’s why the Dutch working group has put efforts in two main activities: improving the translation and connecting the Cool Farm Tool as a background calculator to the most used Farm Management Systems in the Netherlands.
Naomi Chouinard from Cosun Beet Company commented: “The main benefit of the Cool Farm Tool for our company is to stimulate thinking about management decisions concerning carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. When the CFT is integrated into our existing farm management and registration tools, it will enable farmers to understand their impact and compare it to that of other farmers.” Mr. Ywema said that “For our integrated annual report we have used the Cool Farm Tool to calculate the footprint of our total agricultural production. We have simply added up the data of all of our farmers as if it was a huge farm. Now, with the new translation implemented, we may even use this as opportunity for a contest: the farmer with the lowest C-footprint for his potatoes!”
The next step will be to explore an extension of the list and names of agrochemicals and fertilizers mainly used by Dutch farming businesses.
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