Spotlight Series

Over the last 3 years, Kaylyn Reagin, Cotton and Peanut Sustainability Extension Educator at the University of Georgia, has been helping growers learn about their sustainability options and achieve their sustainability and regenerative goals. Working closely with growers across South Georgia, Reagin utilizes Field to Market’s Fieldprint Platform® to tangibly demonstrate the positive impact sustainable management practices can have on their operation.

Reagin is a full-time staffer on the University of Georgia, American Peanut Council and Cotton Incorporated Georgia Cotton and Peanut Project, a project enrolled in Field to Market’s Continuous Improvement Accelerator. The project started in 2014 with a single grower and has expanded since then to over 50 growers, with the main goal to evaluate the sustainability metrics of Georgia’s most viable row crops (cotton & peanuts). With the ever-present need for transparency across the supply chain, and the increasing demand for sustainability among consumers, the project’s collaborators are using Field to Market’s metrics to equip farmers with the data and info needed for them to make invaluable sustainability improvements.

Simultaneous to the project, as part of her PhD research, Reagin has been exploring how different sustainable and regenerative practices can affect cotton and peanuts, as well as how implementing those can be incredibly helpful in the long run.

“Sustainability is about the future,” notes Reagin. “It’s about being able to provide high quality of life alongside high-quality yields, not just for now, but for many years to come. It’s important to take a second look at the management practices we’re doing today, and that we might have been doing for years. They might be sustainable in the sense that they provide high yields every year, but are they sustainable in the sense that our children and grandchildren down the road will be just as, if not more, productive as we are?”