Independent evidence for climate-smart agriculture practices under §45Z. Each article shows what satellite-based verification produces at county scale — and what it means for the facilities claiming the credit.
Documentation records what was claimed. A grower files paperwork. A platform timestamps it. An aggregator bundles it into a report. The record exists. But the record does not test whether the practice actually occurred on the specific acres, in the relevant crop year, at the intensity required by the regulation.
Verification tests what actually happened. Satellite observations — radar and optical, at 10-meter resolution — measure field-level conditions independently of any commercial relationship with the grower. No enrollment required. No self-reported records as primary proof. Where the evidence is not strong enough, acres are classified UNKNOWN and counted against the claim, not excluded from the denominator.
That distinction is not philosophical. Under proposed §45Z regulations, insufficient substantiation of upstream practices does not reduce a credit. It can eliminate it entirely. The articles below show what a defensible evidentiary standard looks like in practice — one layer at a time.
Each layer addresses one satellite-verifiable practice defined under USDA’s Climate-Smart Agriculture framework. Together, they build the integrated verification stack that maps directly to §45Z carbon intensity calculations.
NDTI-based residue detection identifies conservation tillage practices across millions of acres. SAR corroboration resolves ambiguity in high-clay soils where optical signals alone cannot distinguish practice types.
Temporal vegetation signatures across fall-through-spring windows detect overwintered biomass presence and termination timing — the agronomic outcome, independent of how or when the cover crop was established.
Per-year crop classification across five observation years, validated against NASS county statistics. A hierarchical architecture adapts classifier complexity to signal conditions while holding evidentiary controls constant.
Pixel-level overlay of tillage, cover crop, and rotation verification. GOLD / SILVER / BRONZE classification quantifies how many acres in a sourcing radius substantiate multiple simultaneous practices.
GREET calculates carbon intensity. KVASIR verifies the practices that justify those calculations.
