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…
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…
Last month, Daniella Malin, the Food Lab’s Agriculture & Climate Program Director, participated in a launch meeting of OpenTEAM in Denver, Colorado. The collaborative project seeks to harness vast amounts of open source data and software to drive soil health improvements across millions of acres of farmland and change the future of our planet. OpenTEAM…
The USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience is happy to share the launch of a new website aimed to provide coffee companies with the resources they need to combat climate change. The Climate Smart Coffee website, launched in early May, was created to increase private sector engagement and funding in smallholder…
The Sustainable Food Lab is happy to announce the publication of The Climate-Smart Agriculture Papers, Investigating the Business of a Productive, Resilient and Low Emission Future. This book is a collection of research focusing on climate-smart agriculture and includes authors from over 30 institutions. The material covers conversations around climate impacts, climate-smart varieties, farm management, supply and…
In honor of World Soil Day, the Food Lab has created a soil health communications toolkit to help our partners talk to the business relevance of soil health. The toolkit includes: An open source slide deck that connects the importance of soil health to business, identifies best practices and showcases private sector actions. The deck is…
Daniella Malin, Senior Program Director of Agriculture & Climate at SFL and Deputy General Managerof the Cool Farm Tool is the co-author of a new article, Cool Farm Tool Water: A global on-line tool to assess water use in crop production. Published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, the article introduces the methodology for the popular…
The Living Income Community of Practice, of which the Food Lab is a founding partner, released a report on the Ghana Living Income Benchmark & Analysis of Income Gaps for Cocoa Growing Regions. The study outlines a roadmap to achieve living incomes for cocoa farmers through a credible, third party analysis. Follow these links to the…
We are excited to announce the release of the Lean Research Field Guide v1.0! The Lean Research Field Guide is the result of a collaborative effort by the Lean Research and Sustainable Food Lab communities and includes 45 practices and practical examples from 10 different organizations. Published by MIT D-Lab, many people contributed to the guide…
How we conduct research, monitoring, and evaluation matters. Primary research is an intervention into the lives of research participants as well as a way to inform decision-making. Please listen below to the webinar focused on how food and beverage companies, and their NGO and university partners, have applied the lean principles of rigor, respect, relevance, and right sizing…