Certifications, certifiers, and LiteFarm

One of the biggest benefits LiteFarm offers farmers is assistance with record keeping requirements for various certifications, including Organic certification. But how does certification work, what role do certifiers play in this process, and how does LiteFarm make certification easier?

What are certifications?

Certifications are sets of rules and regulations that describe specific management practices and record keeping requirements. By complying with these rules and regulations and appropriately documenting their compliance, a farm gains the right to market their products as certified under that standard. The most well known standard is “Organic” (though what exactly that means varies from country to country and jurisdiction to jurisdiction). The USDA has the following to say about their USDA organic certification:

Organic certification verifies that your farm or handling facility complies with the USDA organic regulations. Once you are certified, you can sell, label, and represent your products as organic. These regulations describe the specific standards required for you to use the word “organic” or the USDA organic seal on food, feed, or fiber products.

In general, farmers are incentivized to seek out certifications because:

1. It aligns with their agricultural philosophy and they want to support the movement

2. Certified products tend to demand a price premium over non-certified products

3. Both

There are many types of certifications available to farmers, from the well known to the obscure. Eventually, we would like LiteFarm to be a vehicle for getting any types of certifications that supports our Mission Statement and have a sufficient number of users and infrastructure to be economical to (fund and) build. Per our Paradigm, we will connect with these certifiers directly through software integrations or indirectly through exported documents.

However, in almost all cases certification compliance has direct and indirect costs. Direct in terms of fees paid directly to certifiers or inspection agencies and indirect in terms of the burden to comply with prescribed practices AND to transparently document compliance with prescribed practices. For example, certified Organic farmers can only use products that have been approved for use on organic farms AND they must document the purchases, dates, quantities and locations the product was used.

From this point on, we’ll narrow our focus to discuss specifically Organic certification, since this is the best known and earliest type of certification that LiteFarm will implement (Summer 2021). Organic certification processes vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but in general farmers must:

1. Document their inputs, outputs, and management practices

2. Submit documents to a certifying body (on a regular cycle)

3. Undergo an audit or inspection on their farm

4. Enact any changes required by the certifying body

So now that we understand what a certification is, lets discuss the certifier the farmer works with.

What is a certifier?

Focusing solely on the Organic certification for now; Organic certifiers are bodies that verify that a farmer is meeting the standard in their jurisdiction to be considered Organic. There are international standards (ISO) for organic certifications based on the IFOAM (https://www.ifoam.bio/) principles. However, many countries also have a certification scheme as well. Some countries also have state / provincial bodies as well. For example, Canada has a federal standard, the COR (Canadian Organic Regime), but BC farmers may opt to use the provincial standards outlined in the BCCOP (British Columbia Certified Organic Program).

There are large differences in the difficulty of achieving Organic status by country. For example, the documentation burden to become Organic certified in many Latin American countries is much lower than in Canada. Some national standards are considered to be roughly equivalent (though different). For example, products that are Organic certified in the US can be used as inputs into Canadian processed goods and the end result is still considered Canadian Organic. Some jurisdictions (such as Canada) use a permitted substances list to explicitly define what can be used on an organic farm, while others (the United States) create a prohibited substances list to define what cannot be used instead.

Certifiers are typically local groups that have their own accreditation from the provincial / state, national, or international standards agency verifying their ability to verify compliance with Organic standards. That’s a mouthful, but simply stated: certifiers work directly with farmers to ensure they are fulfilling the standard the ascribe to. Certifiers typically:

1. Provide farmers documents for farmers to fill out in order to document their compliance

2. Receive and review farmer’s documents

3. Subcontract (to maintain impartiality) an audit or inspection of member farms

4. Inform members of any changes to the provincial / state, national, or international standard

You may have noticed that this list is very similar to the farmer focused list in the previous section. Farmers and certifiers are on opposite sides of the handshake that allows certifications to be possible (there are participant guarantee systems where farmers are the certifiers within their communities, but that situation isn’t covered in this document).

It’s also important to note that while a standard will be uniform within its jurisdiction, the way certifiers ask farmers to document compliance with that standard may vary. For example, a standard may state that seeds must be certified Organic, but the individual certifier will dictate what documentation is necessary to actually prove compliance.

In the next section, we’ll focus primarily on how farmers document their compliance and how inspections take place, because this is where LiteFarm can play an important role in simplifying certifications for both farmers and certifiers.

What does this look like in LiteFarm?

In line with our Mission Statement, LiteFarm is designed to meet farmers where they are and help them get certified if that’s what they want. For these farmers, LiteFarm can collect all the information necessary to verify compliance with the chosen standard. It should also export the documents needed to prove this compliance in the forms used by their certifier. This aligns with our Paradigm to make diversified farming practices more financially sustainable. On the other hand, farmers that aren’t interested in certifications, for whatever reason, shouldn’t have to deal with the added documentation burden that certifications and certifiers require. Aligning with our central Paradigm of usability, their interactions in the app should be much simpler for this type of user. Everything discussed below will be part of our Summer 2021 release.

Below is an example of how a user might document their inputs in LiteFarm for an Organic Nantes Carrot variety. the leaf icon denotes ‘required for organic’, and shows up if a user has indicated they want to apply for or maintain organic certification during on-boarding. Since the user indicated an interest in Organic they are required to provide several additional properties and supporting documents that would not be required for a non-certified user.

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In addition to these built in hints, some screens will be significantly different based on a user’s interest in certification. Below is another example of this when adding a non-Organic greenhouse (on the left) and an Organic-certified greenhouse (on the right) using the Canadian Organic standards.

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Both of the examples above refer to the collection of data in support of documenting compliance with the certification. However, this picture isn’t complete without talking about certifiers as well. The below diagram describes the 3 types of interactions that determine how certification data is handled in LiteFarm.

First, at the top we have the on-boarding process. This is the point where a farmer can indicate their interest in certifications and certifiers. These answers are saved and will modify the users experience throughout their use of LiteFarm.

Second, the bottom portion illustrates how many types of interactions with the system are modified based on a users certification preference. Based on the certification or certifications that a user selects at onboarding, input screens will be dynamically updated in order to facilitate the entry of all necessary information for that certification. As the farmer uses these screens throughout the season, LiteFarm ensures they are inputting the needed information to document their certification compliance.

Lastly, on the right side of the screen we discuss exports. Exports are focused on the certifier rather than the certification. For example, consider a farmer has indicated interest in an Organic certification, but isn’t sure which certifier they should work with - so they select two during on-boarding. The data they enter throughout their time in LiteFarm is consistent with the Organic certification, but the final format of compliance documentation is dictated by the certifier the user chooses when generating their compliance documents.

The system we’ve described above for taking certification and certifier interest from a farmer and customizing their experience in LiteFarm around those decisions will be delivered in the Summer 2021 release.

We anticipate LiteFarm can also simplify the audit process by giving farmers the ability to selectively grant read-only access to Verification Officers to their farms. This feature would be part of a future, yet to be announced release. If this is important to you, feel free to request this feature here via the ‘Submit Idea’ button on the top right.