LandCorteva Agrisciences2022

Getting 1.1 million acres of farmland through a data-entry gauntlet

Qualifying for carbon credits meant an enormous amount of manual data entry. I designed the structure, statuses, and bulk actions that got submission rates to 94%.

My role: Product designer — persona research, task flows, interaction design, testing with 12 farmers
Focus: Product design, UX research, Interviews, UI/UX
Outcome: 1.1M acres enrolled, 94% submission rate, 60% less CS time

Granular Insights carbon field details screen showing historical baseline data for a field, over a photograph of a crop field

Context

The Corteva Carbon Initiative generates registry-issued carbon credits for farmers at scale. Farmers enter their practice change data into Granular Insights, Corteva’s free tool for measuring impact and earning additional income.

Qualifying takes an enormous amount of data entry — on top of actually farming.

The key decision

Most participants adopt practice changes for agronomic reasons and treat carbon payment as a bonus. So the product couldn’t use the payout as the reward for finishing a long form. The reward had to be legible progress and confidence the data was right.

Persona sheet for Carbon Pathway Patty: a South Dakota farmer in her early sixties experimenting with reduced tillage, with motivation ratings for experimentalism, tech propensity, and soil health — Patty's motivation is agronomic. That changes what the product has to reward.

What I did

Mapped the work with the people fielding the complaints. Journey mapping with customer success surfaced the questions the product should have been answering itself.

Workshop journey map built from colored sticky notes across three horizontal swimlanes, tracking customer steps, feelings, and opportunity areas

Task flow diagram with branching decision diamonds mapping how a farmer enters practice change data across multiple fields and crop seasons

Tested three information hierarchies with 12 farmers. Farmers organize records in strikingly different ways, so I sketched all three plausible orderings rather than polishing one. Cheap sketches are easier to disagree with than finished screens.

Hand-drawn whiteboard sketch of a data entry table organized field first, then practice change event, then year — Option one: field → event → year.

Hand-drawn whiteboard sketch of the same data organized field first, then year, then practice change event — Option two: field → year → event.

Hand-drawn whiteboard sketch organizing data by year across the top with practice change events listed down the side — Option three won: year → event → field. Farmers think in seasons, and it matched how they already keep records.

Carbon field details screen showing crop seasons from 2016 to 2020 as separate cards, each with a completion percentage and an edit button — Progress is legible per season, so a farmer can stop and resume without losing their place.

Historical baseline data table listing practice change events by date with edit controls, and a green confirmation banner at the bottom

Cut the form down conditionally, so farmers who skipped a practice never see its questions.

Field data entry form asking whether cover crops were planted during the 2020 crop season, with yes and no options and conditional follow-up questions

Added bulk actions after feedback that manual entry got repetitive. The edge cases carried the work — what happens when some fields are already filled, and when none are left.

Three states of the bulk entry control: applying a value to all fields, to some fields via a multi-select, and a disabled state when no fields remain

Spreadsheet synthesizing feedback from advisor sessions, with participant responses grouped by question across columns

Outcome

1.1M acres enrolled across 31 states
94% submission rate
60% reduction in customer success time

The 60% is the one I point to: product guidance replaced a human explaining the same thing over and over.