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…
As we prepare for the Cool Farm Alliance’s 2016 Annual General Meeting, we are also looking back to reflect on several notable achievements marked in 2015. Specifically, the Alliance: Was announced winner of the hotly-contested ‘Practice with Science’ Award Added new software features including data aggregation and a more flexible fertilizer interface allowing users to…
Michele Pisetta from Ferraro, Ann Burkhart from Starbucks, and Susan Forsell from McDonalds discussed opportunities for finding the shared business case for implementing sustainability measures, when partnerships are useful and determining when it is essential to have your own ‘boots on the ground’.
On April 1, the California Department of Water Resources hydrologists are expected to announce the smallest snowpack ever in state history. This will mark the fourth year of an unprecedented drought that has strained the capacity of residents, farmers, business, and government to respond to the immediate crisis and to think strategically about the future of water…