Steve Peterson, a farmer and General Mills employee, says there’s a wrong way and a right way to motivate farmers to change their agronomic practices.
The wrong way is to tell a farmer what to do and how to do it.
The right way is to tell the farmer it’s an opportunity to best his neighbour.
“I call it the Frank Lahr model of change,” said Peterson, director of sustainable sourcing at General Mills, who also runs a farm near Paynesville, Minnesota.
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Lahr was Peterson’s neighbour and was regarded as the best farmer around Paynesville.
“Any farmer, they’ll tell you they’re most motivated by having a better crop than their nearest and best farmer. That was Frank for us.”
With the Frank Lahr model in mind, General Mills and more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies have em-barked on a project called Field To Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture.
McDonald’s, Walmart, Unilever, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola, Cargill and Land of Lakes have worked with grower groups, including the National Association of Wheat Growers, National Corn Growers, the United Soybean Board and the American Farm Bureau, to encourage farmers to adopt more sustainable practices.
Peterson said Field to Market doesn’t tell farmers what to do or how to do it.
“Field to Market is not about a prescriptive checklist…. It’s not about compliance, ” said Peterson, chair of Field to Market.
“This is about measuring your operation, looking through the sustainability lens and then looking for opportunities to be more effective in the application of your inputs…. Stewardship choices equal en-hanced profitability…. We look at it as an innovation opportunity.”
Field to Market was formed in 2007, but the organization has spent most of the last seven years establishing a consensus around what is sustainable and what is not.
The result is the Fieldprint Calculator, an online program for potato, corn, cotton, rice, wheat, alfalfa and soybean growers in the United States.
The calculator evaluates the environmental footprint of a farm based on:
- land use
- soil erosion
- soil carbon
- irrigation water use
- water quality
- energy use
- greenhouse gas emissions
Field to Market president Rod Snyder said it uses tillage, water use, variable rate fertilizer and other agronomic factors to establish an environmental footprint.
Field to Market is an American project based on U.S. Department of Agriculture science, so the Calculator doesn’t apply to distinctly Canadian crops such as canola and oats.
Snyder said the organization might soon make it available for Canadian growers.
“We have had a lot of interest from Canada,” he said. “We’ve heard from groups up there that would like to take a similar approach.”
