By: Preston Brown, President, incite.ag 
With spring underway and a new round of 45Z guidance released, feedstock carbon intensity (CI) scoring is moving from concept to reality for many. On-farm practices and CI data are expected to play a significant role in lowering ethanol scores. That shift brings clarity, but it also brings decisions. Should plants opt towards engaging their supplier network in scoring, the next major decision surrounds when to engage growers and how to navigate feedstock programs at scale.
The data needed to score those feedstocks can be found at the farmgate today. But the challenge associated with scaling a feedstock CI program is not the data availability; it is the timing.
Many regions are a few weeks away from the start of planting their 2026 crops. Naturally, once planting season begins, the growers being engaged to share that archived 2025 CI data are no longer focused on last year, but the moment at hand.
In our experience, when running commercial-scale CI programs slated to start in the spring, a timeliness challenge often emerges. Planting and spraying windows grind CI scoring to a halt. For many growers, if a CI scoring “story” is not told and CI data is not shared before planting starts, their availability to re-engage in the topic does not meaningfully return until after the fourth of July. And by then, programs are competing with “stale” CI messages plus common seasonal conflicts like fairs, vacations, in-season management, and some early harvest preparation.
This is where timelines are often miscalculated.
While it may feel like one has a year to run a feedstock CI program, the effective window is far smaller. In most cases, if a pre-plant supplier-engagement window is missed, there is a 60-to-90-day mid-summer period when growers are most reachable and receptive. Overshoot that timeline, and engagement will drop sharply until after harvest and the holidays.
All of this matters because feedstock CI scoring is a volume exercise. If expected supply shed CI reduction for one’s feedstocks is a conservative ~5 kg/MMBtu, moving a plant’s CI score across a 45Z rounding threshold requires volume, and volume requires time.
For ethanol producers preparing 45Z feedstock programs, start with the expected low-CI feedstock volumes required to impact your score. Look at your calendar and highlight your “key engagement windows”. Plan programs around the realities of seasonal fieldwork. And start early enough to avoid one of the most common and costly mistakes we see: realizing too late that the window for meaningful feedstock scoring has already closed.