Quick Start Guide for Rapid for Virgin Money

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How Does Rapid Work? 

How does Rapid deliver a high level of accuracy while retaining such an agile, fast user experience? 

1. Built on top of “full-throttle” Sandy experience

   Rapid has been designed by the same people who built Sandy’s no-compromise, best-in-class carbon and natural capital models. Years of doing everything in maximum detail in Sandy has shown exactly which inputs and processes truly drive a farm’s footprint and which ones barely move the needle.

2. Materiality: focus on what actually matters

   Rapid uses a materiality assessment: it concentrates on the sources that make up almost all of the carbon footprint and deliberately drops or simplifies the trivial “last few percent”. It also applies a “soft” materiality layer – keeping smaller items in scope, but handling them in a more streamlined way so the farmer isn’t asked for unnecessary detail.

3. Fewer questions, more information

   The design philosophy is to make maximum use of every answer you give and avoid duplicate or frivolous questions. For example, Rapid may only ask for nitrogen rate, but behind the scenes it infers P & K use, embedded emissions, and modifies emissions based on soil, wetness and climate. In arable, it infers tillage type from the operations you select and uses that to adjust soil carbon modelling.

4. Smart use of location data

   From a postcode or a simple map location, Rapid automatically looks up soil type, climate and other spatial layers (at fine resolution, allowing for farms crossing soil boundaries). This lets it run detailed soil carbon and emissions models without asking the user to input specialist data.

5. Tightly coupled questions and models

   In Rapid, the questions and the calculation methods are designed together and controlled in one place. If a method changes, Rapid can instantly stop asking for data it no longer needs or optionally ask for new, more detailed inputs. This keeps the tool lean and avoids the “ratchet” effect where forms get longer and longer over time.

6. Refined livestock scoping

   Instead of asking “how many of each animal did you have?” and leaving the farmer to juggle herd dynamics, Rapid asks about the core outputs and key KPIs that describe the system. It then builds an appropriate herd/flock structure behind the scenes, reducing the risk of mis-scoping (for example, where a B&B system should really be split from a breeding herd).

7. Advanced but hidden mitigation engine

   Mitigation is modelled with a framework that can stack multiple strategies, account for interactions, and filter out options that don’t fit the current system (e.g. can’t go to zero till on potatoes, or recommend a practice you’re already doing). For the user this is simple – tick a box and refresh – but under the bonnet it’s using system-specific multipliers to give realistic, context-specific reductions.

8. Fast, light-touch for the user – heavy lifting in the background

   Overall, Rapid is designed to feel extremely simple to use, while quietly doing complex work behind the scenes. It avoids asking questions just to look thorough and instead relies on sound science, smart inference, and a structure that can be quickly refined as new practices or edge cases appear.

   Rapid is the first step on the journey towards fully optimising your natural capital with Sandy. 

Frequently Asked Questions: 

What is Rapid, in plain English?

Rapid is a carbon simulator for farms. You answer a short set of practical questions about your farm, and Rapid uses those answers – plus maps, soils and climate data – to calculate your carbon footprint and show how different changes on the farm would affect it. It’s built to be fast to use but still properly detailed under the bonnet.

If it’s so quick, how can Rapid be accurate?

Rapid is quick because it asks smarter questions, not fewer questions by cutting corners.

We use what we’ve learned from our full-detail tool (Sandy) to focus on the things that really drive your footprint. Where possible, one answer is used in multiple ways, and we pull in extra data (like soils and climate) automatically from your farm’s location. The modelling itself is every bit as serious; we’ve just moved most of the hard work off your desk and into the engine room.

Why doesn’t Rapid ask me hundreds of questions like some other tools?

More questions do not automatically mean a better footprint.

A lot of questions in other tools are either:

• immaterial (they barely change the final footprint), or
• already implied by other answers, or
• actually out of scope for standard farm carbon accounting.

Rapid has gone through that sorting exercise carefully. If we ask you something, it’s because it really matters. If it doesn’t move the dial, we either drop it or handle it in a simplified way behind the scenes.

What sort of information will I need to have to hand?

We’ve kept the input list deliberately short and practical. Typical things you’ll need are along the lines of:

• Your farm location (postcode or dropping a pin on a map)
• Areas and crops grown, with basic information on rotations and operations
• Nitrogen use on crops (we can infer a lot from that)
• Key livestock outputs (e.g. litres of milk sold, lambs sold, finished cattle sold) and a few KPIs that describe your system
• Broad details of your fuel, fertiliser and bought-in feed use

You won’t be asked to dig through every invoice on the farm, and you won’t be asked to guess obscure details that don’t affect the result.

How does Rapid use my farm location?

When you give Rapid your farm postcode or map location, it automatically looks up:

• Soil types across your farm
• Climate information (temperature, rainfall, etc.)
• Other mapped layers that influence emissions and soil carbon

These are brought in at a fine spatial resolution, and if your farm straddles more than one soil type, Rapid accounts for that. You don’t have to know any of this – the system just quietly uses it to make your results more realistic.

Why does Rapid only ask for nitrogen rates on crops?

Nitrogen is a good “scale factor” for a lot of things that happen in crop production.

From your nitrogen rate and crop type, Rapid can:

• Infer reasonable levels of P and K use
• Estimate embedded emissions in those fertilisers
• Model direct fertiliser emissions, adjusted for your soil, wetness and climate

So you see a single, simple question, but that one answer unlocks a lot of detailed modelling behind the scenes.

Does Rapid take tillage and soil carbon into account?

Yes – and again, without making you fill in big extra forms.

In arable, when you select your field operations, Rapid recognises which ones correspond to different tillage approaches (e.g. direct drilling vs conventional cultivation). It then uses that to adjust soil carbon and emissions for that crop. You don’t have to separately label your tillage system unless we genuinely need that extra detail.

How does Rapid handle livestock systems?

Livestock scoping can easily go wrong if you’re just asked “how many of each animal did you have?”

Rapid does the heavy lifting for you by:

• Asking for your main outputs (e.g. lambs sold, litres of milk, finished cattle)
• Asking a handful of key KPIs that describe how your herd or flock works

From that, it builds an appropriate herd/flock structure in the background and calculates emissions accordingly. You don’t have to wrestle with average animal numbers or guess how to split complex systems – the tool handles that for you.

I’ve got a slightly unusual system – will Rapid cope?

Rapid has been designed to be refined as new systems and practices come up.

Because the questions and the calculations are tightly coupled, it’s straightforward for us to adjust methods or add new options where needed. That means we can both:

• give you a robust result now, and
• improve how we reflect particular systems over time, without making the questionnaire longer and longer.

How does Rapid suggest mitigation options?

Once Rapid has calculated your footprint, you see a list of basic mitigation actions (changes you could make) relevant to your system. You simply tick options and refresh to see how your footprint would change.

Behind that simple tick-box view there is a more complicated framework that:

• Knows what you’re already doing, so it doesn’t suggest the same thing again
• Knows which actions are compatible with your farm (e.g. not suggesting zero till in potatoes)
• Uses system-specific multipliers (things like herd size and energy requirements) to estimate the impact in your context, rather than just saying “this action always saves 10%”

So you get clear, tailored mitigation numbers without having to decode a technical manual.

Why are some things I expect to see not included?

Standard carbon accounting guidance allows you to ignore very small items that together make up only the last few percent of the footprint. Chasing those would turn the process into box-ticking about things like tiny quantities of materials, while barely changing the result.

Rapid intentionally leaves out or simplifies those items so that your time is spent on the big drivers of emissions, and we avoid giving a false impression of accuracy by making you answer lots of trivial questions.

Is Rapid just a cut-down version of Sandy?

No. Rapid uses the same scientific thinking and experience that went into Sandy, but its purpose is different.

Sandy is a deep, full-service platform, which allows users to fully understand the relationships between natural capital, farming outputs and profitability. Sandy is considered the industry's leading end-to-end solutions for natural capital assessments, optimisations and costings aligned with all major global standards. Rapid is built as a fast carbon-only simulator to get you started on the journey: it uses the key drivers, smart inference and location data to give you a robust footprint and explore “what if?” scenarios rapidly. 

How often will Rapid be updated?

Because the questions and the modelling are closely linked, Rapid is set up to be iterated quickly. As new practices emerge or we get good feedback from users, we can refine methods, add options or improve the mitigation engine without bloating the questionnaire. So you’re using a tool that is not only solid today, but designed to keep improving.

How should I think about Rapid in my day-to-day decision making?

Think of Rapid as a fast, dependable simulation calculator for your carbon position and your options. It won’t tell you how to farm, but it will show you:

• where the big emissions are in your system
• which changes would make the biggest difference
• how different choices compare before you commit to them

Our aim is that you spend your time thinking about decisions, not wrestling with the calculator.

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What do my carbon calculation results mean?