Publicly Available Spatial Datasets to Track National Adoption of On-Farm Conservation

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?

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.

Viridis View Workshop Lays Foundation for Updated, Public Data for Conservation Ag

On June 3 in Raleigh, CTIC hosted a workshop to launch the Viridis View Conservation Benchmarking Collaborative. The event was attended by 50 experts representing academia, conservation groups, and tech startups, as well as state and federal government agencies.

Viridis View has two primary objectives:

1. To build publicly available and near-real-time datasets on the county-level adoption of conservation tillage and cover crops from 2015 to 2030 (multiple estimates based on remote sensing)
2. To unlock opportunities to improve the accuracy of these methods, such as assembling accessible ground-truthing data. Viridis View will track progress in conservation by delivering the county-level datasets in an accessible manner to all members of the public.

Ryan Heiniger (CTIC) and Dr. Chris Reberg-Horton (North Carolina State University, NCSU) opened the workshop, welcoming attendees and recognizing co-hosts and co-organizers, including the Walton Family Foundation, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, The Nature Conservancy, and NCSU.

Dean Hively (USGS) provided context on the importance of remote sensing for conservation tracking, explaining how satellite data can support multiple important environmental goals and regulatory frameworks.

Presentations were then provided by five teams that had responded to CTIC’s invitation to offer county-level tracking estimates on the adoption of cover crops and conservation tillage, all based on processing of remote sensing imagery: DTN, Iowa State University, Indigo, Regrow, & Terra Diagnostics. A presentation was also given by the University of Maryland/NASA Acres on their offer to make their Confidential Clean Room technology available to the collaborative.

Dave Gustafson (CTIC) presented a sketch proposal on how the multiple county-level estimates could be presented on the CTIC website. Dean and Ryan facilitated a discussion on obstacles and opportunities for collaboration on the assembly of accessible ground-truthing data for the purpose of improving estimates and potentially also for independent validation of the various methods.