Fieldprint Calculator: Results from the Texas High Plains

Sustainability of agricultural production is an important issue with regard to the marketing of agricultural products in today’s world.  The Fieldprint Calculator is a tool—designed by Field to Market, the Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture—that computes the sustainability levels of a producer’s operations and aids in evaluating potential changes that may improve sustainability in the future. The objective of this study was to analyze the Fieldprint Calculator’s data output for cotton production sites in the Texas Alliance for Water Conservation (TAWC) project in the Texas High Plains region. A sustainability index was created from the data, and the sites were evaluated across a time period of seven years, 2007 to 2013. An aspect of the study was to evaluate the relationship between the sustainability metrics and profitability for cotton production sites in the TAWC project.