Project Narrative

Terion's Mid-South Rice Program serves as a landscape-level program through which individual corporate sponsors fund discrete projects focused on specific grower cohorts, geographies, or sustainability objectives. Sponsor investments directly support grower incentives, technical assistance, enrollment, monitoring, and outcome quantification. Since 2019, Terion (formerly Source by Indigo Ag) has consistently expanded its footprint in the rice sector by onboarding new corporate partners each year to the program.The program has generated approximately 49.6 million gallons of water savings across crop years 2020-2024 (49,636,000 gallons, to be precise). Terion verifies practice implementation and quantifies water and GHG outcomes using a monitoring-modeling approach that leverages verified grower data, site-specific weather and soils data, peer-reviewed research and literature data, and field-scale models. Terion employs a modeling methodology specifically designed for rice cultivation in the Mid-South region. It consists of three main components: cradle to farm gate non-land GHG emissions, land GHG emissions using statistical emissions models, and a field-scale water model. This approach follows IPCC Guidelines for estimating greenhouse gas emissions and includes region-specific adjustments based on findings from published studies. To determine the environmental impacts achieved through a program, the modeling framework described above is used to simulate environmental outcomes under the distribution of rice production practices in the region published in the annual B.R. Wells Arkansas Rice Research Studies. These simulations apply the same soil and weather conditions as fields enrolled in a program to establish a season and program specific baseline. The project’s impact is evaluated as the difference between the project emissions (or water use) and the baseline emissions (or water use).  When new sponsors initiate investment in the program, water benefit estimates are initially generated using the Curve Number (CN) methodology to provide an assessment of anticipated outcomes. For funded projects, Terion can additionally apply process-based watershed modeling, including SWAT, to quantify final outcomes and evaluate water quality benefits where desired.