Initiated from our ARPA-E SMARTFARM funded projects, we have developed the SYMFONI solution - the first-of-its-kind “system-of-systems” solution to quantify field-level agricultural carbon outcomes. SYMFONI simultaneously comprise the following components: (i) scalable collection of ground truth data and cross-scale sensing of environment variables (E), management practices (M), and crop conditions (C) at the local field level; (ii) advanced modeling with necessary processes to support the quantification of carbon outcomes; (iii) systematic Model-Data Fusion (MDF), i.e. robust and efficient methods to integrate sensing data and models at each local farmland level; (iv) high computation efficiency and artificial intelligence (AI) to scale to millions of individual fields with low cost, and (v) robust and multi-tier validation systems and infrastructures to ensure solution fidelity and true scalability.

In the past few years, we are extensively applying the SYMFONI solution to the following major cropping systems in the US, including (1) corn and soybean in the US Midwest, (2) spring and winter wheat in the US Wheat Belt, (3) cotton in the Southern US, (4) rice in the US Delta region, (5) pastureland of the Great Plains, and (6) miscanthus for marginal land. Through these efforts, we developed accurate and scalable quantification of soil carbon and GHG outcomes from the field to regional scales. The SYMFONI solution enables the explicit outcome quantification of various management practices, especially the climate-smart practices, including cover cropping, smart fertilizer applications, conservation tillage, rotational grazing, improved tile drainage, etc. These works build a solid foundation to enable field-level quantification of carbon intensity scores, thus paving a way to realize the climate-smart agriculture commodity market.