COOL FARM ALLIANCE
Our flagship project, the Cool Farm Alliance brings together farmers, NGOs, multinational food suppliers and retailers to promote agricultural practices that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Unilever, PepsiCo, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Yara, Heineken and Fertilizer’s Europe have joined forces as founding members of the Cool Farm Alliance whose mission is, “To enable millions of growers globally to make more informed on-farm decisions that reduce their environmental impact. Focusing on greenhouse gases in the first phase, the Alliance provides the Cool Farm Tool as a quantified decision support tool that is credible and standardized. The Cool Farm Alliance serves as both a knowledge platform and a tool development forum.”
New members join the Alliance to work together at a global scale to reduce GHG emissions from agriculture. Members benefit from and contribute to solving a shared problem – how to use current scientific knowledge to motivate action and generate results.
Originally an on-farm GHG calculator and now being extended to include modules for measuring water and biodiversity, the online Cool Farm Tool provides scientifically robust quantification methods that are sensitive to farm and field scale management choices. The Tool works by providing growers with the ability to plug in their farm and practices and get immediate results and instant feedback on the impact of different farming management options using “what-if” scenarios.
Leading up to the formation of the Cool Farm Alliance, the Sustainable Food Lab developed and tested ways to measure and incentivize low-carbon agricultural practices through the food supply chain with a team of member companies, university researchers and technical experts in a two-year Cool Farming Options project. Increasing soil organic matter, improving fertilizer application, and capturing methane from livestock are turning agriculture from a problem (accounting for one/sixth of global GHG emissions) into a solution (by enhancing the capacity of crops and soil to store carbon). The Cool Farming Options project supported more than 18 sponsoring companies to assess green house gas emissions by engaging farmers and identifying management options to to help reduce emissions with help the help of the Cool Farm Tool agricultural GHG Calculator.
For more information, contact Daniella Malin at [email protected]
