Hal Hamilton and Elizabeth Reaves In late 2020, one of our colleagues, who is responsible for the greenhouse gas commitments of a large food company, asked us to help quantify costs and GHG impacts of work with farmers in their supply chain. The company was having some difficulty justifying projects in crop agriculture because of…
DetailsMark Torrens, a grain buyer for Mars Petcare, had been watching the changes in weather and wheat yields across the Asia-Pacific region, and he worried about future supply. Four years ago, he invited the Food Lab to join him in New South Wales, Australia. We spent a few days with Mark and his colleague Sarah Heazlewood,…
DetailsThe Food Lab is thrilled to announce that together with Practical Farmers of Iowa, we have been awarded a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) which will expand our work to understand the value proposition of diversified crop rotations in the Midwest. The $1.1 million grant was one of 24 projects selected from more than 100 applicants through the…
DetailsFarmers cannot invest in their farms if they can’t cover their costs of production and generate a margin for reinvestment. One of the Food Lab’s key tenants to a sustainable supply chain has always been farmer profitability. In smallholder-based systems, farmer poverty rates are high and many lack access to basic social services, the Food…
DetailsPFI 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…
DetailsBy: Hal Hamilton The most important book I’ve read in years is Rebecca Henderson’s Reimaging Capitalism in a World on Fire. It’s the right book for this moment during which we each tumble with both fear and hope. She occasionally lets her deep caring show, but her style is pragmatic, almost matter of fact as…
DetailsAs mentioned in one of our previous blog posts, the Living income Community of Practice, co-hosted by the Food Lab, ISEAL and GIZ, has shifted our annual workshop originally planned for Abidjan in April, to a series of three virtual workshops. The second of the three-part series will take place on May 27th (more information available here).…
DetailsMany of us are finding silver linings in the global shutdown, even as we fret about the fate of our more vulnerable partners in farming communities bound to suffer dearly from the economic fall-out of the pandemic. While comparatively small, the opportunity to engage for longer, more reflective conversations is one such silver lining. The…
DetailsBy 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…
DetailsLearning from Two Value Chain Pilots Informs New Business Guide for Addressing Food Loss & Waste in Smallholder Systems Smallholder supply chains and family farms in the developing world hold exciting potential for reducing food loss and waste (FLW) and increasing the profitability and sustainability of our food systems. For this reason, the Food Lab…
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