ESMC Technical RFPs

ESMC issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to invite proposals for Eco-Harvest project development for 2024. This RFP offered an opportunity for implementation partners to develop, launch, and implement regenerative agricultural projects under the Eco-Harvest program. The annual outcomes generated from these projects meet food and beverage supply chain commitments and continue to build out and scale ESMC/ESMRC programing to deliver national scale impacts across the agricultural and food and beverage sector supply chains. 

In June 2022, General Mills Inc (GMI) and Ecosystem Services Market Consortium (ESMC) announced the development of a multi-year roadmap to meet General Mills’ supply chain carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) and regenerative agriculture commitments through ESMC’s Eco-Harvest market program. Eco-Harvest, launched in May 2022 after more than three years of pilot testing and refinement with agricultural supply chain and value chain partners, is an innovative ecosystem services market program that pays farmers for beneficial environmental outcomes from regenerative agriculture. Eco-Harvest meets food and beverage sector annual Scope 3 reporting needs for quantified, verified soil carbon removals and reduced GHG emissions from agricultural production within their supply chains.   

ESMC and GMI issued an RFP to invite proposals to launch projects that can generate annual outcomes to meet General Mills’ supply chain commitments and outcomes, and to continue to build out and scale ESMC/ESMRC programing to deliver national scale impacts across the agricultural and food and beverage sector supply chains.  

PROJECT SUMMARY: ESMC/ESMRC is seeking proposals from organizations that provide soil sampling services or soil analytical services or both to be carried out as a sub-contract on behalf of ESMC as ESMC moves into 2022 full market program launch.

As background, ESMC has launched projects within specific regions and production systems where program buildout has been completed. ESMC’s map continues to expand as ESMC adds more regions and production systems. As part of the credit quantification process, soil from a producer’s field must be analyzed for soil organic carbon, bulk density, pH, and, in some cases, phosphorus. ESMC/ESMRC has developed a Soil Sampling Protocol to establish and standardize the process of collecting and analyzing soil samples for use in quantifying outcomes from producer management practice changes at the field-scale. ESMC will host a virtual Q & A session for potential applicants on November 30, 2021 @ 11.00 am EST. To register, contact Neville Millar at nmillar@ecosystemservicesmarket.org. All proposals are due on or by December 21, 2021. View the full RFP here.

PROJECT SUMMARY: ESMC/ESMRC is seeking proposals to build out our market ready MRV platform, MRV (v3), to continue with 2021 and 2022 pilot enrollment and processing and to prepare for the late 2022 Market Program Launch. ESMC envisions this work merging into existing work as possible, and the MRV v3 build as a collaborative transition using the work to date as a basis for the platform design and requirements. We seek proposals for this collaborative effort and have developed key Program milestones as a guide for platform development phases and timelines, including a timeline to shift current producer accounts into to the new platform. View the full RFP here.

PROJECT SUMMARY: ESMC seeks development of a white paper on policies relevant to private, voluntary ecosystem services markets, to include carbon/GHG, water quality, and water quantity credits. The white paper should assess the policy landscape to further inform the refinement of ESMC’s protocols, business plan, pilot projects – including projects launched, soon to launch, and in planning stages, across the continental US – and ultimately the full market. For this assessment, grazing on public lands encompasses the management of livestock on range, pasture, and silvopasture owned by state or federal government under a valid permit or lease with the appropriate agency. Since soil health is one important component of ecosystem services from agricultural working lands, we include the USDA NRCS definition of soil health as “the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.” The geographic scope of the assessment is limited to the agricultural working lands of the lower 48 states. View the full RFP here.

PROJECT SUMMARY: The purpose of this RFP is to find surrogate measurements for N2O to generate credits based on these measurements. The group would also like to quantify the tradeoffs and correlations between ecosystem services – e.g. correlations among GHG fluxes and correlations between GHG fluxes and water quality/quantity measurements. Much as a single GHG flux may be estimated from another measurement, there is a strong potential that improvements in one ecosystem service will tend to improve another. Whether this is generalizable or whether there are risks that market-driven solutions for GHG or water will not have unintended consequences is not fully understood. View full RFP here.

PROJECT SUMMARY: The purpose of this RFP is to design and implement comparative research studies in the context of ESMC pilot projects – pre-soil sampling stratification across selected ESMC pilot projects, evaluate soil sampling SOPs, associated uncertainties, and sampling costs; compare options for an ESMC Scope 3 Soil Sampling SOP against the full Scope 1 soil sampling SOP for model calibration/validation and uncertainty in asset generation; test sampling intensity for optimal and accurate determination of baseline SOC stocks for prediction of Scope 3 SOC accretion using DNDC. The results of this are to determine a soil sampling SOP that will satisfy asset certification requirements equal to or better than current accepted protocols. View full RFP here.

The proposal submission period is now closed.

PROJECT SUMMARY: This RFP seeks to engage one or multiple partners to build a web and/or mobile platform that generates a set of points for soil sampling based on publicly available input data that produces high accuracy estimates of soil carbon stock changes due to management at a reasonable cost. View full RFP here.

Proposals must be submitted as a PDF document by email to Caroline Wade, ESMRC Program Director, at cwade@ecosystemservicesmarket.org by July 3rd, 8pm ET. Final decisions will be made by July 17th and all vendors will be notified by July 20th. If you have questions regarding this RFP, please contact Stephen Wood at stephen.wood@tnc.org.

PROJECT SUMMARY: This RFP seeks to engage one or multiple partners to identify, assess, test, and map the development of advanced tools and technologies that can more efficiently and cost effectively measure and quantify soil C changes and net GHG reductions to help ESMC generate carbon and GHG assets. The work will include in-field testing of promising innovative tools and technologies on ESMC pilot project sites. View full RFP here.

UPDATE: Awards for this RFP have made. A team led by Repliculture, LLC with support from Regen Network Development, Inc. was awarded a contract for Phase 1 work. They will work collaboratively with the Phase 3 awardee, a team led by the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC) with support from Alliance of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Science Societies (ACSESS). Phase 2 work has been postponed and the RFP may be reissued later this summer, so stay tuned!

PROJECT SUMMARY: This RFP seeks to engage one or multiple partners to design and implement testing and evaluation of the APEX water quality model and WQIAg tool approaches as part of ESMC’s Integrated Protocol for water quality credit generation on pilot project sites. The work will cover ESMC’s 2020 pilot regions to demonstrate viable water asset generation, discover needed modeling improvements or adaptations, recommend Protocol refinements, while identifying opportunities to support model calibration, validation, expansion and automation. View full RFP here.

UPDATE: Awards for this RFP have made. A team led by Tetra Tech with support from Texas A&M Agrilife and Stone Environmental was awarded a contract for Modules 1 and 2. Module 3 work has been postponed and the RFP may be reissued at a later time, so stay tuned!