Start from what you already measure, and add two things to each number: where it came from and the day it was taken. A first report of environmental, social and governance (ESG) figures, the ones a buyer or a bank now asks farms to show, is not a new measurement project. It is the indicators the farm already keeps, gathered onto one page, each one carrying a source and a date so a reader can check it instead of taking your word. What the report is for is not to prove the place is sustainable. It is to turn scattered numbers the farm already has into something someone outside the gate can examine.
The request usually arrives from outside. A buyer’s questionnaire, a bank’s credit file, a cooperative’s form, each asking for figures on fuel, fertilizer, water, people, accidents or licenses. The farm has most of those numbers somewhere already, in the fuel log, the agronomist’s plan, the payroll, the accounts. What it does not have is one page that says which number, from where, and when. The pull at that moment is to hire a consultant, adopt a framework with a hundred indicators, and start measuring things the place has never measured. That is the expensive way to make a first report, and it is not the one the frameworks themselves ask for.
Is a first ESG report new measurement, or the records you already keep?
The records you already keep. When researchers ran ready-made sustainability tools on real farms instead, the tools took time and taught the farmers little. Evelien de Olde and colleagues, at Aarhus University in Denmark and Wageningen University in the Netherlands, went through 48 indicator-based sustainability assessment tools and ran four of them on five Danish farms, two dairy and three pig. The four tools took about 2 to 9 hours per farm, counting preparation, assessment and reporting (the authors note that full assessments in general can take up to weeks), and the farmers came away judging that the tools gave them limited new knowledge and insights.
The data those assessments leaned on was already on the farm before any tool arrived: the accounts, the farm management system, the crop and fertilization plans. So the raw material of a first report exists before a consultant is hired. The FAO’s own sustainability framework for food and agriculture, SAFA, sorts that raw material by where it comes from, rating each figure as primary, secondary or estimation data, and it treats an owner’s guess made without documentation as low quality. A first report is built by collecting the primary records, not by generating new numbers to fill a template.
What turns a number in the report into evidence instead of a claim?
The source and the date. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a set of standards companies use to write sustainability reports, asks the organization reporting to be able to identify the original sources of the reported information and to indicate which data has been measured. It was written for companies, not farms, but the same care applies to a farm’s one page.
SAFA folds the same idea into a single rating. Its Accuracy Score measures the quality of the data behind each figure, and its parts are the timeframe, data type and methodology. Read in plain terms, the timeframe is the date and the data type is the source. A fuel number with no date and no origin is a claim. The same number tagged as diesel from the purchase records, for the last cycle, read off the accounts, is evidence. Those two tags are the whole difference between the two, and they cost the farm nothing to add, because the farm already knows where the number came from and when.
Which indicators go in, and who decides?
The ones that matter to whoever asked and that the farm can already source, sorted into the three sides of ESG. SAFA names four dimensions, good governance, environmental integrity, economic resilience and social well-being, which is ESG with the money column set beside it. Inside each side, the indicator you can point to a record for is worth more than the one that reads well.
Christian Schader and colleagues at FiBL, a Swiss research institute for organic farming, compared sustainability assessment methods across the food sector and found that indicator selection determines the assessment results, so the list you choose shapes the score you get.
That is the selection rule for a first report: choose the indicator you can put a record behind. On the environmental side that is often where the farm’s emissions come from and the fuel and fertilizer behind them. On governance it is documents the farm may already have written, a code of conduct people signed and the documents the first internal audit checks. On the social side it is the accident and training records and a written harassment policy and a channel.
Nóra Gombkötő and colleagues at Széchenyi István University in Hungary designed a tool to assess each farm around easily measurable metrics at the farm level, for the environmental, economic and social sides. A first report can follow the same logic: a figure nobody on the farm can measure is hard to report again next cycle.
| Side | An indicator you likely already measure | The record it comes from | The date it carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Environmental | Diesel used in the cycle | fuel purchase records in the accounts | the cycle’s start and end |
| Environmental | Nitrogen applied by field | the fertilization plan and delivery notes | the date of application |
| Social | Lost-time incidents | the accident log | the date of each event |
| Social | Training given | the training roster | the date of each session |
| Governance | Code of conduct in force | the signed page | its effective date |
| Governance | Licenses and permits current | the permit file | the issue and expiry dates |
When does a first report say more than the farm can source?
When it carries indicators the farm cannot source. SAFA warns that a statement of good intent is not evidence of sustainable practice and that such a statement can be used to project an image of sustainable practice beyond the actual effort of the enterprise. A report padded with indicators the farm cannot source does exactly that, and two versions of the failure are common.
The first is the estimate dressed as a measurement. SAFA counts a figure guessed without documentation as low-quality data, so an estimated number is marked an estimate and never reported as if it had been read off a meter.
The second is the borrowed template. A hundred-indicator template copied into a first report brings indicators the farm has no number for. A short report with a source on every line holds up to a buyer’s questions better than a long one with sources on half.
Where to start
The work fits in an afternoon with the accounts and the records you already keep, and it ends in one page. Paper is enough. Outside help comes in only if a buyer or a certification program requires a specific standard, which then has to be read first, with a specialist if needed.
Keeping each number with its source and date on one line, and redoing the page next cycle, lets you compare one year with the next and answer a buyer or a bank with figures they can check. That comparison is part of farm management, and the other sustainability articles cover more of the records a buyer may ask to see.
The report that survives a buyer’s reading is rarely the longest one. It is the one where every line traces back to a record with a date, and the blank rows were left blank on purpose. A farm that can show where a number came from has answered the question an outside reader is most likely to ask, and it answered with paper it held before the request arrived.