If you are looking for COMET-Tools trainings in regards to the USDA Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities, please view and register for a COMET training on the calendar. The COMET-Outreach Team will also host training sessions specifically for those participating in a Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities Project. Along with an introduction to the COMET-Tools (GUI & API) and a live demo of COMET-Planner, these sessions will also include a Q&A with a USDA representative! Sessions will be held on November 16th and 30th, 2023 at 12pm Mountain Time. Stay tuned for December sessions. Please use this link to register in advance.
The COMET-team is unable to "add" practices or modify the tools to fit any specific project. If you are unable to figure out how to enter a specific scenario or management practice into COMET, please send a detailed description of the scenario to the team and we may be able to provide a solution.
Regarding the guidance in the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Funding Opportunity (page 19), it states that “…the Carbon Management Evaluation Tool (COMET) should be used where applicable”. However, that does NOT mean that you need to partner with anyone here at CSU. USDA and our team will be providing assistance to all projects participating in the program in using the COMET tools.
With respect to assistance now during the application period, USDA/NRCS seeks to provide equitable support to all Climate Smart Commodity Partnership applicants, and therefore we are directing everyone (with COMET inquiries) to the COMET Help Desk and the publicly-available COMET training sessions listed in the calendar on the tool web site (https://comet-farm.com/). Our goal is to provide everyone with equal access to the COMET tools and the COMET Help Desk throughout the application process.
With respect to assistance in using COMET for all projects that get selected for funding, USDA and the COMET team will provide resources both to help train users (as above) and to help them run their data through the COMET tools. Projects using COMET-Planner will be provided with assistance and training sessions as needed and the full COMET Planner data is available for download and use by partnership projects. Projects seeking to run farm-level data through the COMET-Farm tool, via an API, will be provided assistance in doing so by the COMET team but if you anticipate running field-level data for a large number of farms (hundreds to thousands) through the COMET-Farm API, then it is recommended that you allocate a small amount of funding (~$5,000) to pay for the server and computer costs associated with these really large batch runs through the API.