The SRP has developed a certification standard for improving the sustainability of rice production among smallholders and suppliers. The immediate goal of the SRP is for one million smallholder rice farmers to adopt the standard to ensure sustainable best practices in rice production, boosting farm incomes and protecting the environment. However, collecting and verifying the required data for monitoring compliance of smallholders and suppliers is a slow and costly process.

To date, over 500 smallholder farmers have been interviewed in the rice fields of Pakistan, India and Cambodia in order to collect data and verify their level of compliance towards the SRP standard.

The data collection exercises are still going on, and are expected to end after the next harvest. The data collected has been visualised in an online dashboard to enable the rice suppliers and Mars Foods to quickly analyse online maps, graphs and other visualisations, rather than relying on excel files. Making sense of the farmer data that has been collected in the field goes far beyond verifying compliance toward the SRP standard. Continued monitoring of the data, including the performance of the farms, provides important feedback to ensure the relevance and robustness of the SRP standard, while creating a basis on which to communicate progress towards sustainable farming practices in future.