We are excited to announce the release of the Lean Research Field Guide v1.0! The Lean Research Field Guide is the result of a collaborative effort by the Lean Research and Sustainable Food Lab communities and includes 45 practices and practical examples from 10 different organizations. Published by MIT D-Lab, many people contributed to the guide…
DetailsHow we conduct research, monitoring, and evaluation matters. Primary research is an intervention into the lives of research participants as well as a way to inform decision-making. Please listen below to the webinar focused on how food and beverage companies, and their NGO and university partners, have applied the lean principles of rigor, respect, relevance, and right sizing…
DetailsSoil Under Our Feet Click here for PDF version Soil Building Dilemmas and Breakthroughs Elizabeth Reaves and Hal Hamilton This past June, while facilitating a learning journey with a group of 30 young sustainability executives from major food companies, we found ourselves standing quietly under a bluebird Iowa sky in Jeremy Gustafson’s farmyard, looking out…
DetailsIn collaboration with the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience—a consortium comprised of climate scientists from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT); and the agricultural lender Root Capital—The Sustainable Food Lab and Root Capital have produced An…
DetailsThe demand for organic grains is growing. Aroostook County, Maine is a region that could help to meet this gap in supply, but organic grain farming as a standalone business is not profitable in Aroostook County, at the scale that most grain farms currently operate at. Mixing other, more profitable crops into a rotation with…
DetailsThe 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…
DetailsBuilding high performing and resilient sectors requires looking beyond the value chain and improving the governance of a sector. The last two decades have seen an increasing emphasis on company and supply chain driven approaches to promote sustainable production and trade of agricultural commodities such as cocoa, coffee, cotton and staple crops. Some of these…
DetailsSmallholder farmers around the globe are facing unstable productivity due to changing climate and weather patterns. The ways in which the private sector supports these farmers to build resilience to climate change and/or engage in efforts to mitigate climate change can have significant impact on the ability for farmers to make a living, the security…
DetailsDon Seville, Co-director of the Sustainable Food Lab, and Jan Gilhuis, Senior Program Manager in the IDH Fresh & Ingredients Program, discuss the Sustainable Vanilla Initiative. Hear about the motivation behind setting up the initiative, gain insight into the activities carried out with private and public partners, and learn why investing in sustainable livelihoods for…
DetailsThe Sustainable Food Lab and Business Fights Poverty have been collaborating to advance learning on how to improve the economic benefits of trade with smallholder farmers. Growth in those farmers’ incomes is fundamental to economic and social development, to farmers’ ability to reinvest in their farms and to the sustainable supply of crops bought by…
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