RFP Open for Conservation Benchmarking Collaborative Through March 13

Viridis View project seeks to provide publicly available spatial datasets to monitor and track national adoption of on-farm conservation practices.

Conservation in agricultural systems is at a pivotal moment, with a multi-year decline in commodity prices and a stressed ag economy, generational turnover in farm operations, federal funding pauses, contract cancellations, and new program rollouts. Recent years have seen major changes in the scale and sources of new public and private investments to promote the adoption of regenerative practices, including a $700 million announcement from USDA in December 2025. However, the most recent USDA AgCensus (published in early 2024) suggests that the rate of adoption of one key practice, cover crops, has actually slowed in recent years.

Despite the significant public and private investments into promoting and incentivizing the adoption of conservation practices, stakeholders are currently limited to the AgCensus (released only once every five years) to learn whether the investments have moved the needle at the landscape level. Collectively, the nation invests billions of dollars in such practices, but are we making sufficient progress in the key geographies at the rate needed to accomplish visionary goals?

CTIC is seeking partners to join a new initiative, Viridis View — A Conservation Benchmarking Collaborative, to help answer this critical question. Issuance of this RFP reflects our conviction that there is an urgent need for greater collaboration across the entire conservation and ag tech community, including data scientists now using machine learning and other advanced methods to process remote sensing data in order to track conservation trends in near real-time. We seek aligned organizations and institutions that are willing to share their spatial datasets with the public at free or substantially reduced prices and work pre-competitively to increase the accuracy of these data. Based on past efforts, we believe there is a compelling business case for companies to partner with us as a way to generate leads for their offerings.

In order to help answer questions on this unique opportunity, CTIC will host a virtual (Zoom) information session at 11 a.m. CST on Tuesday, February 17, as well as daily office hours (11-2 CST) for any potential partners wishing to learn more. We thank you in advance for your interest in helping with this critically important effort.

See the full RFP below: