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…
In collaboration with the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience—a consortium comprised of climate scientists from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT); and the agricultural lender Root Capital—The Sustainable Food Lab and Root Capital have produced An…
The Sustainable Food Lab and Business Fights Poverty have been collaborating to advance learning on how to improve the economic benefits of trade with smallholder farmers. Growth in those farmers’ incomes is fundamental to economic and social development, to farmers’ ability to reinvest in their farms and to the sustainable supply of crops bought by…
Peter Senge, long time friend and colleague and author of the The Fifth Discipline and other bestselling books, has come out with a new book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Ae Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. The book reveals the revolution already underway in companies around the world creating an alternative…
Agriculture is a source of livelihoods for an estimated 2.5 billion people globally. It provides jobs for 1.3 billion smallholders and landless workers. Thus, it has enormous potential to reduce rural poverty. Yet agribusinesses are usually built around a small number of large-scale suppliers ignoring that 85% of the world’s farms are managed by small-scale…