Carbon Initiative

The Corteva Carbon Initiative first launched as a pilot program in 2021 and has since then expanded through a joint effort with Indigo Ag to improve the process of generating rigorous, registry-issued carbon credits at scale for farmers. Participating farmers enter their practice change data into Granular Insights, Corteva’s free digital tool to measure their impact, improve soil health and earn extra income.

There is an extensive amount of data entry to qualify to earn the carbon credits, so the goal was to make the process as simple and seamless for the farmer. Providing clear statuses, breaking up steps, enabling bulk actions, and exploring smart defaults were approaches we tested and implemented.

ROLE:
Lead Product Designer

TEAM: 
Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Developers, Agronomists, Data Scientists, User research, QA, external stakeholder partner (Indigo)

Understanding our Audience

Many of our participants are motivated to adopt practice changes for agronomic reasons and see Carbon payments as a small value add. Our primary persona, Pathway Patty, was the type of user who would most likely participate in the program.

After some preliminary generative research, this value statement was developed to drive towards as we designed the experience:

We make it simple to get the most for farmers’ soil health practices while keeping them in control.

Design Iteration

IDENTIFYING TASK FLOWS

SKETCHING AND IDEATION

Initial concepts to determine the information hierarchy were tested internally and externally. Farmers organized their files in a variety of ways, so we wanted to get to the structure that made the most sense for them.

These were reviewed with our various stakeholders and pros and cons were assessed for their technical feasibility, alignment with existing design system elements, and general usability.

Usability Testing

CARBON PARTICIPANT POOL

We worked with our user research team to identify a small pool of 12 farmers who would be engaging with our product team to provide feedback over the course of several months.

CO-DESIGN & ITERATION

Along with feedback from our pool of farmers, we also sought ideas from our customer success and education content design team, who provided internal feedback. We collaborated on various elements like report layouts, progress indicators, and copywriting.

REFLECTIONS & OUTCOMES

Beginning to understand the range of farmer attitudes towards carbon markets was critical to how likely they were to trust a product like ours. As data intensive as it is, farmers who are early adopters want to see returns along with a smooth software experience.

METRICS

For our first year of the program, we had set some reasonable but modest goals for field and acreage enrollment. We quickly blew past these goals, so much that we needed to tell our sales team to slow down the pitches. This was extremely encouraging but also challenged us to scale the experience accordingly.

>1.1M Acres Enrolled
In 31 states and counting

FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS

• Smart Defaults so that farmers could spend more time reviewing instead of retrieving and entering data

• Notifications so key deadlines and remaining progress would be provided in a timely way throughout the season to ensure field submission

• Further integration with the rest of the Granular insights product experience so the data entered would be shared and valuable for customers who want to expand their feature set beyond Carbon.
  
  

RECENT RELEASES