The Food Lab is thrilled to announce that together with Practical Farmers of Iowa, we have been awarded a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) which will expand our work to understand the value proposition of diversified crop rotations in the Midwest. The $1.1 million grant was one of 24 projects selected from more than 100 applicants through the…
Farmers cannot invest in their farms if they can’t cover their costs of production and generate a margin for reinvestment. One of the Food Lab’s key tenants to a sustainable supply chain has always been farmer profitability. In smallholder-based systems, farmer poverty rates are high and many lack access to basic social services, the Food…
PFI has observed benefits from diverse rotations with small grains, including GHG reductions, roots in the ground year-round and yield improvements, from farmers like Tom Frantzen pictured above We are entering our fourth year of working with and collecting data from Midwest farmers to document the benefits of diverse rotations – and the on-farm data…
As mentioned in one of our previous blog posts, the Living income Community of Practice, co-hosted by the Food Lab, ISEAL and GIZ, has shifted our annual workshop originally planned for Abidjan in April, to a series of three virtual workshops. The second of the three-part series will take place on May 27th (more information available here).…
Learning from Two Value Chain Pilots Informs New Business Guide for Addressing Food Loss & Waste in Smallholder Systems Smallholder supply chains and family farms in the developing world hold exciting potential for reducing food loss and waste (FLW) and increasing the profitability and sustainability of our food systems. For this reason, the Food Lab…
With help from the McKnight and Walton Family Foundation, Practical Farmers of Iowa and the Food Lab have launched the Cover Crop Leadership Lab (CCLL), a peer to peer group for farmer led organizations, which aims to increase cover crop use throughout the Midwest. Farmer facing programs that connect groups of farmers in one place,…
In 2018, the Food Lab (in our role with the Living Income Community of Practice) supported the Ghana cocoa sector to establish a sector wide living income benchmark and publicize the accompanying KIT income gap analysis. Following this work, the Food Lab has worked closely with Steering Committee member, Kuapa Kokoo Ltd, to develop an…
In 2016 the Food Lab joined an USAID Feed the Future program focusing on private sector engagement in climate-smart agriculture. The program became three linked initiatives (shown below), and to date, the many partners involved have made great strides toward engaging the private sector to act on climate smart agriculture in their supply chains. You…
In a case study produced for the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience, the Food Lab features member Ben & Jerry’s and their effort to increase cocoa farmer income while building resilience to climate change. Helping Cocoa Farmers to Achieve A Living Income and Adapt to Climate Change follows the popular ice…
From the creation of the Cool Farm Tool to our work in climate-smart agriculture, much of the Food Lab’s focus has been on building resilience, reducing agricultural GHG emissions, improving soil and above ground carbon sequestration and improving farmer livelihoods. For many of the organizations we work with, reaching and measuring climate targets while making…