Farm groups urged to pay attention | Changing demands from consumers and corporations will affect producers
A trip to the grocery store isn’t what it used to be.
It’s difficult to walk down a supermarket aisle without glancing at a labelling claim, whether it be free range, fair trade, grass-fed, animal welfare approved, rainforest alliance, natural and non-genetically modified.
However, a food industry consultant says sorting through the noise isn’t as difficult as it may seem because all the labels really say the same thing: the food is produced sustainably.
“There’s a whole range of stuff that falls into that bracket,” said Matt Loose, a director with the management consultancy Stratos in Toronto.
Read Also
Claims filed in Alberta hailstorm aftermath
The numbers are still coming in for the cost of the damage caused by a huge hail storm that hit various areas of Alberta Aug. 20.
On April 9, Loose presented a research study on corporate practices and sustainable food at the second annual Canadian Food Summit, a Conference Board of Canada event in Toronto.
Loose said in an interview before the summit that global behemoths such as Unilever, McDonald’s and Walmart are pulling the food industry into a new era of sustainability.
There are currently as many questions around sustainable food as answers, but Loose said the food industry is headed swiftly in that direction.
“Nearly 30 percent of all new food products released include messaging about the sustainability of the product,” said a Stratos document, “What is sustainable food?” that was posted on the company website.
The same Stratos paper said there is little agreement on sustainability programs, practices and standards in the food industry, which makes it difficult for consumers to differentiate between what is sustainable and what is not.
Fred Kirschenmann, distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, is familiar with the confusion surrounding the vague concept of sustainability.
Kirschenmann said he has heard the same comments about his field of interest for the last 30 years.
“People would always say to me, ‘I don’t know how you can be serious about this because nobody can define it,’ ” said Kirschenmann, who manages a 2,600 acre organic farm in North Dakota.
Despite the ambiguity, sustainability is a word that appears frequently when organic and conventional growers defend their system or label other production methods as unsustainable.
Kirschenmann said the discussion about how to grow food over the long run is the most important and vigorous debate within agriculture.
Defenders of conventional agriculture claim that intensifying production agriculture by applying more inputs and more sophisticated technology is the only way to feed nine billion people.
Those on the other side of the debate, including Kirschenmann, aren’t convinced a system that relies heavily on fossil fuel, deposits of rock phosphate and ample supplies of fresh water is sustainable for hundreds of years.
However, Kirschenmann said there is plenty of room within the discussion for agronomic practices that fall under the heading of sustainable and ecological agriculture.
For example, a U.S. Department of Agriculture initiative called the Natural Resources Conservation Service now has a soil health and sustainable agriculture division. Kirschenmann said the centre works with conventional farmers to help them restore the biological health of their soil.
“They’re seeing incredible results from that. They’ve reduced their fertilizer and pesticide use by 70 to 80 percent.”
In another example, conventional growers in North Dakota and North Carolina now use cover crops as part of a shift toward sustainability.
That sort of agronomic extension and adoption may be critical for the future of sustainable agriculture, but in all likelihood it will be Fortune 500 companies that have the most influence.
“There seems to be a very strong movement for companies to be marketing or branding their pro-ducts as sustainable food items,” Loose said, noting that 13,000 new sustainable food and drink products were launched between 2005 and 2010, according to Mintel, a European research firm.
Kirschenmann agreed that companies and consumers are on a track toward sustainable food. As evidence, he recalled a comment by Richard Schnieders, the former chair of Sysco, a food distribution firm with revenues of $37 billion in 2011.
“He got up in front of this group of farmers … and he said, ‘I want you all to know that the growing edge of our market in our company is all about memory, romance and trust,’ ” Kirschenmann said.
“I was sitting in the front row and I thought, ‘whatever happened to fast, convenient and cheap?’ Because that’s all we’ve ever been told.”
Kirschenmann said today’s consumers want high quality food and a good story that comes with it. Perhaps a tale on how the farmer was kind to the pig, the farm workers were paid fairly or the grower protects the environment.
However, he worries that farm groups focus more on public relations than on building relationships.
“In all of these sectors (organic and conventional), we tend to think all we have to do is a better job of messaging, but that doesn’t get at the core of this new food system that’s emerging,” he said.
“Whether you’re organic or conventional or local or whatever, ultimately you have to pay attention to your customer.”
Loose said global giants of the future may want to know if a particular farmer in Western Canada is growing canola in a sustainable manner.
A corporation may decide it wants to buy canola grown with a minimal amount of fungicides and herbicides, which would force growers to adjust production practices and documentation.
“There may be a multitude of different data requirements that farmers are going to be required or requested to meet,” he said.
“You need to fill this form in to tell us how much pesticides you’re using…. Tell us what you are doing and how well are you performing in these areas.”
Pulse Canada is attempting to position its products as sustainable to take advantage of consumer and corporate expectations. Peas, lentils and soybeans boost soil nitrogen levels, and the industry is trying to put definitive numbers around those environmental benefits.
“Energy input, energy use, water use efficiency, we’re really trying to quantify some of those metrics around those key environmental sustainability indicators,” said Carl Potts, executive director of Saskatchewan Pulse Growers.
The organization hopes food ingredient companies will choose pulses over other options to meet sus-tainability goals if it can generate those figures.
Loose said the shift toward sustainable food systems is much more than greenwashing and branding because companies have realized they need to develop supply chains that are dependable over the long haul.
For instance, Unilever buys 50 percent of global tea production and relies on a consistent supply.
“(Companies) have an interest in ensuring the sustainability of that supply chain,” Loose said. “Make it resilient to climate change or, say, water shortages in key regions.”
While Loose believes major corporations will soon have a substantial influence on farm practices, others say that reality may be a ways off.
Barry McLean, president of Maple Leaf Foods’ Canada Bread Fresh Bakery division, said Walmart is one of his biggest customers and he expects Canada Bread to operate in energy efficient buildings, use less packaging and adopt other practices to reduce the bakery’s carbon footprint.
McLean said those sustainability requirements haven’t yet reached his suppliers, such as questions around the amount of fertilizer or pesticides used to grow wheat.
“It hasn’t gotten to that level. Whether it will or not, I don’t know.”
