By Elizabeth Reaves and Hal Hamilton Regenerative agriculture – a term covering a broad range of sustainable farming practices, many of them as old as agriculture itself – is a topic of increasing interest for farmers and ag companies. How can businesses best contribute to the growth and flourishing of regenerative agriculture? What are…
By Elizabeth Reaves & Hal Hamilton Within a food and beverage company, climate risk affects each function in different ways – and each of these functions can help farmers mitigate and adapt to that risk. This blog draws from a report and a publicly available slide deck on climate risk developed as part of…
Culminating in this report and accompanying resources, the Food Lab and Midwest Row Crop Collaborative led a group of ten companies and The Nature Conservancy to develop an exciting and practical road map for growing regenerative ag across the landscape. Click here to download the report.
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…
By Stephanie Daniels The concept of living income of farmers allows us to consider if the combined effect of various farming practices, voluntary sustainability standards, productivity investments and premiums prices all add up to the conditions under which farmers can afford a decent standard of living. It can facilitate the dialogue regarding the smart mix…
In collaboration with the Organic Trade Association, the Organic Grain Collaboration has co-authored a new report, titled “U.S. Organic Grain – How to Keep It Growing“. The report includes information on organic grain production, market trends and the barriers to expanding domestic organic grain production as well as industry solutions to overcome these barriers. A press…
In collaboration with partners Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS) and Sustainable Agriculture, Food and Environment (SAFE), we are happy to share a new report, Investing in Youth in Coffee Growing Communities, a review of current programs and practices in Latin America. “If coffee is to be sustained as a crop that delivers well-being to communities in…
The demand for organic grains is growing. Aroostook County, Maine is a region that could help to meet this gap in supply, but organic grain farming as a standalone business is not profitable in Aroostook County, at the scale that most grain farms currently operate at. Mixing other, more profitable crops into a rotation with…
Organic grain supply is an identified bottleneck for value-added processes. Growth in grain production lags other organic commodities and remains a negligible amount of total U.S. cropland. An informal group of companies commissioned the Sustainable Food Lab to give them thorough background on barriers and challenges to organic grain production before acting to address the…
Food and beverage companies are facing a rapidly changing world. Consumers everywhere are growing more knowledgeable and concerned about the ethics of where and how their food and drink are produced. At the same time, development organizations are increasingly seeing the critical role of the private sector in creating sustainable economic opportunities for small…
