By Elizabeth Reaves & Hal Hamilton Large-scale commodity agriculture functions the way it does for understandable reasons. But that hardly means it needs to remain stuck in the status quo. A shift to a more regenerative system is both necessary and achievable. This blog draws from a report and publicly available tools developed as…
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.
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…
