Viridis View | Conservation Benchmarking Collaborative

A Novel Coalition To Provide National Tracking for Regenerative Agriculture

The Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC) is proud to organize and lead Viridis View, a new conservation benchmarking collaborative designed to improve the measurement, understanding, and application of conservation practice use and outcomes across U.S. agriculture.

Building on CTIC’s 45-year history of leadership in agricultural conservation data and collaborative partnerships, Viridis View seeks to create a trusted framework for evaluating conservation progress at multiple geographic scales. The initiative will help answer important questions about where conservation practices are expanding, how use is changing over time, and how conservation investments can be more effectively targeted to achieve environmental outcomes.

Viridis View has two primary objectives:

1. To provide near-real-time, public datasets of county-level adoption of conservation tillage and cover crops from 2015-2030 featuring remote sensing-based estimates from multiple groups across several geographies;
2. To collaboratively and pre-competitively improve the accuracy of these estimates by assembling accessible ground-truthing datasets. The University of Maryland/NASA Acres will facilitate and help to manage these confidential data contributions.

Why Now?

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.

The Viridis View Conservation Benchmarking Collaborative is underway to help answer this critical question. CTIC and its partners feel 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.

Additional Development and Collaboration Opportunities

• CTIC is calling on industry collaborators to contribute baseline datasets to ground-truth the data-viewing platform
• Feedback and suggestions on the viewer is welcome as additional functionality is being developed for early 2027
• CTIC Membership provides an opportunity to have a seat at the table to help build the most comprehensive data-driven progress viewer for foundational regenerative practice adoption

For more information on how to support Viridis View and become a CTIC member organization, contact CTIC Executive Director Ryan Heiniger, [email protected], 319.768.8348

About the Viridis View Data Viewer

The Viridis View Data Viewer provides observations based on publicly available, county-scale satellite data for cover crops and tillage practices, including no-till, reduced till, and conventional tillage. Data will be provided for row crops in all Lower 48 states and for the years 2015-2025. Some data providers did not track all 10 years, and methodologies will be provided.

The viewer below is still in development, and the platform will be available for a test drive at the Sustainable Agriculture Summit.

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Our Data Partners

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