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 ourselvesstanding quietly under a bluebird Iowa sky in Jeremy Gustafson’s farmyard, looking out over…
Jan Gilhuis, Senior Program Manager in the IDH Fresh & Ingredients Program, and Don Seville, Co-director of the Sustainable Food Lab, discuss the Sustainable Vanilla Initiative. Hear about the motivation behind setting up the initiative, gain insight into the activities carried out with private and public partners, and learn why investing in sustainable livelihoods for…
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…
The booming organic industry continues to be a bright spot for growth in the US farm economy averaging double-digit growth over the last five years. While the organic industry thrives, acres used for organic production in the US are not growing fast enough to keep up and hover around 2% of total US agriculture with…
Despite the title, this blog is not about sex, unless we consider the teeming reproductive activity of billions of micro-organisms in every tablespoon of fertile soil. I’m writing for those who wonder how important soil health is. Over the years, advocates for sustainable agriculture have promoted the importance of many different goals: fewer pesticides, less…
SAMBAVA MADAGASCAR (May 18, 2017) – The US Department of Labor (USDOL) has provided $ 4 million to the International Labor Office (ILO) to support Madagascar in promoting a sustainable vanilla sector, in particular through promoting decent work and fighting against child labor in the vanilla sector in the SAVA region. Read more.
Check out the video from Expo West 2017 with speakers from Dr. Bronner’s, Sustainable Food Lab, Carbon Underground, Soil & More International, and Numi Tea
For a start let’s not assume sustainable agriculture will automatically solve food insecurity Sustainable Development Goal 2 is often referred to as the hunger goal, or as the agriculture goal. In fact the goal is to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. The targets that need to be achieved…
Contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represents a significant value creating opportunity for business. According to the Business and Sustainable Development Commission, achieving the SDGs will create up to US$12 trillion of market opportunities[1] for companies across the four economic systems studied in its landmark report Better Business, Better World (food and agriculture, cities, energy and materials…
A senior sustainability leader commented the other day that sustainable sourcing programs might be in danger of hitting their targets while missing the point. As sustainability is operationalized, we might be in the weeds of compliance and lose sight of larger goals. Sustainable sourcing generally requires asking suppliers to complete self-assessment questionnaires that can be…
The Sustainable Vanilla Initiative (SVI) aims to improve vanilla bean farmers’ livelihoods and assure the long-term stable supply of high quality natural vanilla. This voluntary food, flavors and fragrances industries program liaises with vanilla exporters, producers, sector organizations and public authorities worldwide to progress issues of governance, traceability, labor rights and technical assistance to grower…
Presenting the report Moving the Needle: Critical Success Factors for Scaling Asset Finance A new report by Epven, with support from the Shell Foundation and the Small Foundation, explores the challenges and emerging solutions to scaling asset finance options for small and growing agribusinesses (SGBs) in developing countries. The investment opportunity in agribusiness…
The CEO Water Mandate couldn’t have stated it more clearly: “Water poses one of the most vital sustainable development challenges of our time.” Increasing pressures on water reserves and the effects of climate change underline the need for the food and beverage industry, along with public sector donors and governments, to prioritize practical solutions to…
Many Midwestern farmers remember oats as a part of their grandparents’ farm, a thing of the past. Corn and soybeans (or 2-crop rotation) now accounts for 95 percent of Iowa’s crop acres. This is slowly changing and oats, with a little help, are making their way back into modern farm crop rotation, bringing with them…
Are landscape approaches the next big thing or a passing fad? The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) , The Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and EcoAgriculture Partners are all part of landscape initiatives sprouting up to promote, learn and encourage companies to get involved. But what’s in…
Over the coming year Sustainable Food Lab will be collecting and sharing stories of system leadership by individuals and organizations. In a Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton, and John Kania describe system leadership as the capacity to catalyze collective leadership. This is a different type of leadership than that of John Wayne…
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…
