Photo shows Steve Swaffar, Executive Director of No-till on the Plains (left) with Jim Johnson, Agronomist at Noble Research Institute (right) examining soil. Steve is an active SHLL member, passionate about his work, attending every meeting, sharing his experiences openly and providing thoughtful questioning and feedback to his peers. No-till on the Plains is a…
By Elizabeth Reaves In the context of COVID, I am finding the tension between current reality and systems transformation to be paralyzing and I came to the concept of hospice. If we let go, what will be there to hold everyone while we bounce forward, or build back better? If resilience is the ability…
By Elizabeth Reaves Just a few weeks ago the Food Lab and some of our corporate partners were standing around in the muddied farmyard of a large Washington State dairy, with a chilly Pacific Northwest mist clinging to the hillsides and sitting low over the cows lined up for milking. For the Food Lab team,…
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…
As part of our Small Grains in the Corn Belt initiative, Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) and the Food Lab are asking the questions: Can farmers be profitable when adding a small grain and cover crop to their corn and soy rotation? What additional sustainability value can be captured by the supply chain? Is it…
Elizabeth Reaves, our Senior Program Director of Agriculture and Environment, is featured in Our Farms, Our Future podcast produced by SARE exploring a catalyst for change in agriculture. Listen to Episode 021: “Finding a Catalyst for Change in Agriculture” here or download from iTunes or Stitcher.
How businesses trade with farmers matters to their profitability and can contribute to farmer livelihoods and resilience. Mark Lundy from CIAT works with a wide range of coffee stakeholders, noting that just as there are many types of farmers, there is differentiation on the business side as well in terms of the quality and quantity…
The path to expanding organic grain acreage in Maine and New Brunswick is not clearly marked. The primary reason is that the market does not generate the profits necessary to entice producers to plant significant new ground in an organic production system, or transition from conventional to organic, when evaluating grain enterprises. However, based on…
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…
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…