Providing grazing management and soil organic carbon data to assess regional impacts of regenerative ag and derisk the transition to regenerative grazing.
The Challenge
Grazing lands are living ecosystems that, when well managed, can regenerate soil health, improve water retention, and sustain biodiversity. While many networks collect soil health data, these measurements are inconsistently connected to detailed grazing management records that capture grazing timing, intensity, and herd characteristics.
Despite growing interest in regenerative practices, the data systems required to understand how grazing management decisions shape soil outcomes remain fragmented, inconsistent, and incomplete. Without these crucial linkages, it remains difficult to evaluate the relationship between grazing management and soil outcomes, compare results across regions, or calibrate ecosystem models that can predict future impacts.
Our Solution: A Shared Data Space
The Grazing Lands Data Initiative (GLDI) is building a multistakeholder alliance and shared data space to link soil and grazing management data across U.S. grazing lands.
A data space is a secure, federated digital environment that enables the permissioned sharing, analysis, and reuse of data among trusted participants while strictly preserving data ownership and control. For GLDI, this digital environment is used to list soil carbon and management data, and in the future, feed predictive models and scientific analysis, and develop producer-facing decision-support tools.
Who GLDI Serves
- For Producers: Land stewards spend significant resources to collect this data, often without adequate compensation. Through GLDI, producers can set the conditions under which their datasets can be accessed, ensuring that producers dictate who has access to their data and how that data may be used.
- For Academic Researchers and Modeler Institutions: Researchers do not know what data sets exist and face heavy workloads related to data cleaning and harmonization. GLDI provides access to datasets that reduce collecting effort and enable reliable cross-site, multi-ranch analysis, and multi-institutional collaboration.
- For Corporate and Supply-Chain Stakeholders: Corporate sustainability teams need trustworthy datasets showing practice-linked outcomes. GLDI provides trusted infrastructure that reduces compliance costs and makes Scope 3 reporting and incentive programs credible.
Prototype Activities and Outcomes
Funded by the Walmart Foundation and led by Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, the nine-month prototype phase (January – September 2026) demonstrated how coordinated, permissioned data exchange can unlock insights not possible within today’s spreadsheet-based or siloed systems.
Key prototype activities included:
- Platform Development: Developed the data space with the ability to list, share and transact for datasets.
- Data Categorization: Created a tagging system to standardize how datasets are described on the data space.
- Governance: Established transparent agreements, roles, and incentive frameworks for trusted data collaboration.
Resources & Next Steps
Join us in building transformative grazing data infrastructure.