Biodiversity on Farms

Educators
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Hello All,

My name is Andrea Hazzard, and I’m speaking on behalf of Terra Sustaina and Hazzard Free Farm. I’m a grain farmer and miller, as well as a seed-saver and breeder. Prior to farming I worked in Native Restoration.

A while back I created a group called Biodiversity on Farms and a project called Biodiversity at Hazzard Free Farm.

What I’m interested in doing is creating a biodiversity index, and then creating marketplace visibility for this highly important farm metric. I believe we need to accomplish carbon solutions at the local level, and that this can be more effective than large international initiatives.

I’ve been talking about using your platform to do this in our farmer caucus

In my opinion the “carbon market” is already rife with greenwashing, and ESG climate disclosures are a start but again, neither are stand alone solutions. Creating transparent data that correlates to ecological metrics allows us to change the marketplace conversation to something useful. Imagine farms that can prove they are a hub of Biodiversity! Now that, is lasting change.

I am in search of models for a better and more fair market place - if you know of any resources that will help me out I encourage you to share!
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I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Is there “space” here for such an undertaking? Would you be willing to promote it? I feel very strongly that we are in a moment where people are very aware of Nature and really embracing it. And that there are or could be a lot of facets… all through the rural and agricultural lens.

Biodiversity within agriculture landscapes
Hunting Lands
Ag conservation projects
Citizen science
A child parent grandparent hobby
A public verification tool for everybody

I do a lot of community interfacing with farmers and students, I was also a 4-H kid and in Scouts, I’m really moved by the desire of people to learn and to do “Something” about Climate Change, I see your platform as a really interesting way to take stock of what is left around us. In the interest of Data collection, if there were a way for us to say this plant tree bird etc, used to be here and is no longer, even to say, it disappeared in 1995 when they widened the road. Maybe that’s too much, I guess I want people to remember what was and what has been lost but could be reclaimed.

We talk alot about Ecosystem Services and this could be a way to account for it.

Thank you for building this. It makes me so happy!

Cheers
Andy

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Have you heard about Xerces Society and Bee Better Certified?

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You might consider looking at Shelburne Farms in Vermont. They’ve been pretty pro-active in conserving and increasing the biodiversity on their property for a while now, and have worked often with the environmental and plant biology schools at University of Vermont on the education, monitoring, and reporting side of things.

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a couple of relevant threads:

in a nutshell, there aren’t great standard ways in the system to record absence, but loading old photos as observations can be quite valuable.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/photos-of-animals-shot-during-hunting-ok/16261

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Hi Andy

If I’m understanding your idea correctly you are looking to use iNaturalist for farmers to document the biodiversity on their land. Once a threshold of biodiversity was met (all the details TBD) the farm would be certified and that certification in turn would be used for marketing goods as well as raising awareness about biodiversity and the role farms play.

Am I understanding this correctly?

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Hi everyone. I am also wondering if iNaturalist database is being used in any ESG reporting.

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