Soil Under Our Feet Click here for PDF version Soil Building Dilemmas and Breakthroughs Elizabeth Reaves and Hal Hamilton This past June, while facilitating a learning journey with a group of 30 young sustainability executives from major food companies, we found ourselves standing quietly under a bluebird Iowa sky in Jeremy Gustafson’s farmyard, looking out…
Millions of smallholders live in poverty, unable to meet basic needs. Smallholder farmers need to improve their incomes and competitiveness if they are to achieve and sustain a decent standard of living, reinvest in their farms, and continue to supply a sustainable crop to multinational companies. The business benefits of investing in smallholder supply chains…
A cross-section of more than 50 people representing the Ghana cocoa sector came together March 9 in Accra to review the advances of the Climate Smart Value Chain project being implemented by CIAT, IITA, Rainforest Alliance, Root Capital and the Sustainable Food Lab. This workshop builds on a kick-off workshop held in May 2015, field visits and joint work combining soil mapping with climate…
As we prepare for the Cool Farm Alliance’s 2016 Annual General Meeting, we are also looking back to reflect on several notable achievements marked in 2015. Specifically, the Alliance: Was announced winner of the hotly-contested ‘Practice with Science’ Award Added new software features including data aggregation and a more flexible fertilizer interface allowing users to…
How to build supply security and resilience with smallholder farmers 22nd – 23rd March 2016 Innovation Forum London, UK This multi-stakeholder conference will address the major risks for smallholder farmers across agricultural sectors, and focus on how to create scalable solutions to tackle future supply chain vulnerabilities. The agenda confronts such topics as innovations in…
Dear colleagues, Any of us with sustainability in our job descriptions can look back with pride or look forward with some trepidation. The launch of the new UN Sustainable Development Goals and the climate agreement in Paris remind us all of the critical role of agriculture in global sustainability solutions. As CEOs make new commitments…
On April 1, the California Department of Water Resources hydrologists are expected to announce the smallest snowpack ever in state history. This will mark the fourth year of an unprecedented drought that has strained the capacity of residents, farmers, business, and government to respond to the immediate crisis and to think strategically about the future of water…
Are your raw materials ‘climate smart’? A new Food Lab and CCAFS partnership tackles the challenge of scaling climate smart value chains. Since 2010, the Sustainable Food Lab has partnered with the University of Aberdeen, Unilever and many others to develop the Cool Farm Tool, an open source quantification tool for measuring GHG emissions in…
There are many sustainability challenges that by their nature cannot be solved by one actor alone. Water shortage, water pollution, climate mitigation and adaptation, and deforestation are examples of supply chain sustainability challenges are often best and most efficiently addressed through collaborative, sometimes public-private, frameworks. Recent progress on reducing deforestation in the Amazon (below) highlights…
The shocking statistic that 33 percent of food is lost or wasted—one out of every three calories—begs the question, what can food and beverage companies do about food loss and waste in their supply chains? There is a long list of urgent and compelling issues that food and beverage companies are already grappling with in…
Many of the countries’ largest organic food companies are working together to overcome a shared challenge: how to increase the supply of organic grain. This group has recently made some headway. At the surface, the challenge can seem a puzzle. Organic supply is unable to meet current demand, let alone projected growth. The organic premium…
As multinational companies grow more sophisticated in understanding their supply chains, the research community is also getting better at modeling and predicting future weather patterns, diseases, water availability and other climate change impacts. The question is, how well are these sectors supporting and feeding each other? Is the science on shifting crop suitability reaching the…
