Who this is for
Anyone reading a completed farm's results and wondering where its mitigation strategies came from. Setting the company-wide ones is an admin job.
Before you start
A mitigation strategy is a change a farm could make — a feed additive, a fertiliser switch, a change in grazing — modelled against that farm's own result. ODOS re-runs the farm's carbon calculation with the strategy applied and shows what the footprint would be.
A completed assessment shows two kinds, under separate headings:
- Suggested by ODOS based on your farm — strategies ODOS identified as relevant from the farm's own data.
- Suggested by [your company name] — the defaults your company has set. These appear on every assessment regardless of how the farm is run. Because they appear everywhere, defaults are a good way to put the same two or three strategies in front of every farm — the ones you want raised in conversation with each farmer.
You need an admin role to set the defaults. Reading them needs nothing special.
Steps
- In the left-hand menu, select Admin, then Mitigation Defaults. Default Mitigation Strategies opens with ten numbered slots and a counter showing how many are filled.
- Select + on an empty slot. A panel opens on the right.
- Find the strategy. Either open a category — Animal Health & Breeding, Animal Nutrition & Feeding, Forage & Pasture Management, Manure & Slurry Management, Nutrient & Fertiliser Management, Output & Production Management — or type into Search strategies…. Select the one you want.
- Set the strategy's parameters. What you are asked for depends on the strategy: an anti-methanogenic feed additive asks which product and what share of the year it is applied, a fertiliser strategy asks what proportion is replaced. These values are modelled on every farm, so choose what you would realistically expect a farm to do.
- Repeat for as many of the ten slots as you need. You can put the same strategy in more than one slot with different parameters — two products from the same category, for instance — though one slot per strategy is usually enough.
- Select Save Defaults.
A filled slot carries a pencil icon to change it and a bin icon to remove it. Save Defaults again after either.
How to confirm it worked
Defaults apply to assessments submitted after you save. Completed results do not pick them up, so you will see the change on the next assessment you submit, not on the ones already done.
Once an assessment is submitted, its strategies appear in three places: Mitigation Actions at the foot of the assessment results, Emissions Reductions Potential in the farm report, and in Analytics.
Each card names the strategy, lists the assumptions it was modelled on, and gives two projected figures — Carbon Footprint in kgCO2e/FPCM and Total Emissions in tCO2e/year — each with the percentage change against the farm's actual result.
Read one card at a time. Each is that single strategy applied to the farm's unchanged result, so the figures are independent and do not add up. Two strategies can act on the same emissions, and adopting both would not save the sum of the two.
Where the ODOS suggestions come from. Each time a farm's footprint is calculated, ODOS checks it against a set of rules covering diet, grazing, replacement rate, manure practice and where the farm's emissions concentrate. Every rule that fits produces a suggestion — there is no ranking and no limit. The set is rebuilt on every recalculation, so suggestions that no longer fit drop away. Where data is missing, a rule is skipped rather than holding up the result.
A farm shows nothing under Mitigation Actions when no rule fits it and no defaults are set.