We’re somewhere north of Fargo, baking under a late-July sun and knee-deep in rolling hills of soy that belong to a farmer who’s been on the forefront of soil building…
By Christina Archer and Stephanie Daniels Our work these days in the Food Lab is primarily organized around the two broad outcomes of agricultural systems that regenerate soil and ecosystem…
By Hal Hamilton Joseph Racape is a retired farmer and former advisor to the French Minister for the Environment. As Joseph showed some friends and me around his village and…
A new guidance document is available on “The Role of Governments in Enabling Living Income in Global Agriculture Value Chains: Guidance for public policy makers”. The document creation was led…
The Sustainable Food Lab is a technical partner along with many other organizations in support of the Midwest Row Crop Collaborative (MRCC) Climate Smart Commodities grant proposal. Focusing on row…
By Hal Hamilton I’ve been thinking about the cultural divide between mainstream farmers and those who self-identify as regenerative or organic. As with many other issues, people get stuck…
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…
By Elizabeth Reaves and Hal Hamilton Regenerative agriculture – a term covering a broad range of sustainable farming practices, many of them as old as agriculture itself – is…
***PLEASE NOTE, WE ARE NOT ACCEPTING ADDITIONAL APPLICATIONS AT THIS TIME*** SFL is thrilled to post an opening for a 1-year contract to provide direct support to PepsiCo. This position…
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…
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…
Building on many years of work on sustainability in the coffee sector, a recent commitment from the International Coffee Council (ICC) and its secretariat the International Coffee Organization (ICO) has…
Depending on where you are, agriculture today is based mainly on simplified rotations such as the corn/soybean system in the Midwest. Planting cover crops is a great first step, but…
Check out this video featuring Kellogg’s work on Cool Soil Initiative in Australia. The Cool Soil Initiative was launched in 2017 under the leadership of Mars Petcare and in 2020,…
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…
By Hal Hamilton The Sustainable Food Lab has two objectives: 1) deliver impacts in the ways that supply chains affect people and nature, and 2) increase the capabilities of “system…
Andre Eitner has been part of the Food Lab family for over decade, including as a participant in our Impact Lab and learning journeys. We decided to (virtually) sit down…
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…
Mark 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…
The 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…
Farmers 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…
PFI 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…
Many 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…
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…
Learning 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…
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 help from the McKnight and Walton Family Foundation, Practical Farmers of Iowa and the Food Lab have launched the Cover Crop Leadership Lab (CCLL), a peer to peer group…
Mars Petcare, with project support from the Food Lab, has become the first company to deliver a case study measuring carbon using the new Gold Standard protocols (standards designed to…
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…
In 2018, the Food Lab (in our role with the Living Income Community of Practice) supported the Ghana cocoa sector to establish a sector wide living income benchmark and publicize…
By Hal Hamilton Since I became a live-next-door grandfather, it has occurred to me that the path to personal mastery, common to both parenting and system leadership, is revealing.…
In 2016 the Food Lab joined an USAID Feed the Future program focusing on private sector engagement in climate-smart agriculture. The program became three linked initiatives (shown below), and to…
In a case study produced for the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience, the Food Lab features member Ben & Jerry’s and their effort to increase cocoa…
From the creation of the Cool Farm Tool to our work in climate-smart agriculture, much of the Food Lab’s focus has been on building resilience, reducing agricultural GHG emissions, improving…
Nile Breweries Limited (NBL), Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Ugandan subsidiary, launched its sorghum-based Eagle Lager in 2002. The sorghum-based beer is crafted from local grains predominantly grown by smallholder Ugandan farmers. The…
For the last three years, SFL has partnered with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) on our Small Grains in the Corn Belt Initiative to promote small grain rotations. With funding from the Walton…
An Introduction to the Core Tools of System Leadership By: Hal Hamilton and LeAnne Grillo System leadership is one output of the Food Lab and Impact Lab, and it borrows…
Since the Food Lab’s beginning 15 years ago, learning journeys have been a core part of our DNA, always accompanying annual summits and sometimes other events too. This year, in lieu…
The USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience is happy to share the launch of a new website aimed to provide coffee companies with the resources they…
Looking to ensure that coffee farmers continue to invest in coffee in ways that enable them to grow production and quality in the face of climate change, Olam, a global…
The cocoa industry has taken bold steps to preventing deforestation in the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI), a public private collaboration between 33 cocoa and chocolate companies (85% of the…
One of the Sustainable Food Lab’s flagship project, the Cool Farm Tool, is reaching new fields and farms. Since 2008 the Tool’s mission has enabled millions of growers around the…
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…
The Sustainable Food Lab has worked with the beverage company AB InBev and its Uganda subsidiary Nile Breweries to explore ways to increase the resilience of small-scale grain farmers to…
Don Seville, Executive Director of the Food Lab, is a facilitator of the Sustainable Vanilla Initiative (SVI), an industry initiative, which aims to promote the long-term stable supply of high quality,…
In collaboration with the Organic Trade Association, the Organic Grain Collaboration has co-authored a new report, titled “U.S. Organic Grain – How to Keep It Growing“. The report includes information on…
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…
Check out our latest Small Grains in the Corn Belt Newsletter which shares what we’ve been up to this past month. From a farmer conference to new modeling capabilities, we’ve…
In honor of World Soil Day, the Food Lab has created a soil health communications toolkit to help our partners talk to the business relevance of soil health. The toolkit…
This month, Sustainable Food Lab launched a monthly Small Grains in the Corn Belt Initiative newsletter. In partnership with Practical Farmers of Iowa, the goal of this initiative is to…
The Impact Leadership Lab is a peer learning community of sustain ability and sourcing professionals in companies. Their next adventure will be a June 2019 learning journey with dairy farm leaders in Quebec and…
Written by Hal Hamilton Sustainability in the business world always begins with quick wins. We increase efficiency with energy, water and fertilizer, for example. Those innovations save money and so…
The Living Income Community of Practice, of which the Food Lab is a founding partner, released a report on the Ghana Living Income Benchmark & Analysis of Income Gaps for…
Like many agricultural crops, coffee is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. How to Climate Proof Your Coffee Supply Chain is an eight part webinar series geared towards coffee suppliers, investors…
Daniella Malin, our Senior Program Director of Agriculture & Climate, is a co-author of a new study on how to reduce GHG’s in commercial egg production published in the Journal…
Food Lab partners have some great tools that are open source. The Academy for Systems Change has made available A System Leader’s Fieldbook that includes tools from many leading practitioners,…
Soil 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…
Smallholder 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…
Despite the title, this blog is not about sex, unless we consider the teeming reproductive activity of billions of micro-organisms in every tablespoon of fertile soil. I’m writing for those…
The Sustainable Vanilla Initiative (SVI) aims to improve vanilla bean farmers’ livelihoods and assure the long-term stable supply of high quality natural vanilla. This voluntary food, flavors and fragrances industries…
Presenting the report Moving the Needle: Critical Success Factors for Scaling Asset Finance A new report by Epven, with support from the Shell Foundation and the Small Foundation, explores…
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…
Are landscape approaches the next big thing or a passing fad? The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) , The Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), International Union for Conservation of…
Over the coming year Sustainable Food Lab will be collecting and sharing stories of system leadership by individuals and organizations. In a Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton,…
A cross-section of more than 50 people representing the Ghana cocoa sector came together March 9 in Accra to review the advances of the Climate Smart Value Chain project being implemented by CIAT, IITA, Rainforest…
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…
How to build supply security and resilience with smallholder farmers 22nd – 23rd March 2016 Innovation Forum London, UK This multi-stakeholder conference will address the major risks for smallholder farmers…
Dear colleagues, Any of us with sustainability in our job descriptions can look back with pride or look forward with some trepidation. The launch of the new UN Sustainable Development…
There are many sustainability challenges that by their nature cannot be solved by one actor alone. Water shortage, water pollution, climate mitigation and adaptation, and deforestation are examples of supply…
The shocking statistic that 33 percent of food is lost or wasted—one out of every three calories—begs the question, what can food and beverage companies do about food loss and…
As multinational companies grow more sophisticated in understanding their supply chains, the research community is also getting better at modeling and predicting future weather patterns, diseases, water availability and other…
