Agricultural Practices Researcher (Remote Possible)

About HowGood

HowGood is an independent research company with the world's largest database on product sustainability. With more than 33,000 ingredients, chemicals, and materials assessed, HowGood SaaS and impact data offerings help leading brands, retailers and investors improve their environmental and social impact. Through in-depth, ingredient-level insights into factors ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to animal welfare to labor risk, HowGood data powers strategic decision-making for the sourcing, manufacturing, merchandising, and marketing of sustainable products.

The Role

You will expand existing modeling of global crops impacts ranging from perennial fruit shrubs grown in agroforestry systems to livestock raised in different systems using our preferred on farm modeling tools. You will also evaluate other modeling tools and platforms in comparison with HowGood’s selected tools. While modeling will be a core responsibility, the role will involve a variety of other projects, often requiring learning something new, such as researching certifications and standards to propose scoring adjustments, research data sources with good crop coverage, update our database on individual crop/location combinations, and much more. While this role will be more focused on crop modeling than other Research team members, you should expect to participate in everything from client calls and questions to data intensive QC efforts. You must be comfortable participating in a fast moving, business goal driven environment, and should have a passion for regenerative agriculture.

The Research Content Team

The content team at HowGood plays a central role in helping our customers understand and decarbonize their supply chains across the food and beverage industry. Carbon accounting and carbon reduction is a critical focus for HowGood, but not our sole focus. We take a holistic look across environmental and social impacts. Our content team’s work enables our customers to understand their impacts and to do the hard work of transforming their supply chains to decarbonize, improve biodiversity and improve working conditions.

Our research content team is responsible for conducting research across our comprehensive set of metrics on ingredients, crops/commodities and locations ranging from most common to those at the edge of the food system. The team also assists with larger projects involving updating or expanding parts of our methodology and supporting bulk data updates, performing quality control checks on product impacts, and much more. For this particular role, we seek a professional with research experience in agriculture and the experience and skills to model crop GHG impacts. Like the rest of the team, you will collaborate with Research content and data team members, the Research metrics team, and other internal teams like Customer Success and Product.

You should have a curiosity and excitement in understanding agricultural systems and practices, by figuring out how to model crop impact adjustments on an ever evolving set of supply chain agricultural practice needs, and a general interest in sustainability. You will play a key role in enhancing and expanding our world leading food and agricultural impacts database by modeling crop impacts, completing research projects on agricultural practices reflecting primary data from our customers’ supply chains, identifying new data sources, supporting new metric design, writing documentation, and much more. A core part of HowGood’s strength is in the research team, including the flexibility required to juggle different projects, and a willingness to answer customer questions so they can see and understand the impacts their products are having on carbon, water, biodiversity, working conditions, and more. You will be excited by the challenge of working in a fast-paced environment and ready to creatively contribute solutions to issues the team is facing.

Required Qualifications:

• A bachelor’s degree in an agriculture-related field
• 2 or more years of relevant full-time work experience after undergrad
• Experience working on a farm (even if one growing season) or knowledge of agricultural production management
• Experience and/or aptitude in modeling agricultural commodities impacts based on inputs, climate and soil conditions, crop characteristics, and agricultural practices
• An understanding of greenhouse gas emissions related to agriculture
• Experience reading and interpreting academic papers
• Ability to make quick, sound decisions based on a set of guidelines
• Ability to manage multiple projects and meet deadlines
• Ability to work independently and with members of different teams
  
  
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• A master’s degree in an agriculture-related field
• 3+ years of relevant experience
• Farm experience including the application of different practices such as inputs, irrigation, harvesting, etc
• Experience with animal science related to the food industry (e.g., livestock, poultry, dairy production systems)
• Agricultural impact modeling in 3rd party tools such as Cool Farm Tool, COMET, Fieldprint, etc
• Farming accreditations such as Certified Crop Advisor
  
  
  

Why work at HowGood?

• Salary range $55,000-$65,000
• Health insurance + Vision & Dental
• 401k with company match
• Unlimited PTO (that we actually want you to use!)
• Paid parental leave
• Work remotely, or from our upstate NY or Brooklyn offices, or hybrid
  
  
  

This is an exciting time for HowGood and its Research team. We have momentum to help our growing list of customers change the food system to a more transparent, sustainable and ultimately regenerative one. It’s fast paced work and the team is a lot of fun!Applicants for this role should be excited to participate in creating new understandings, supporting better decision making and helping to change the food system.

This is a US-based role and applicants must be able to overlap with East Coast hours.

Applications without a cover letter won’t be considered.

HowGood is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We aim to employ people who reflect the diverse nature of society and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. We seek to empower each individual and support the diverse cultures, perspectives, skills and experiences within our workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.