Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture has announced goals to advance the sustainability of U.S. agriculture, committing its membership of 66 grower organizations to driving sustainable outcomes for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, potatoes and other crops in six key areas:
- Sustained reduction in soil erosion to tolerable levels or below on all U.S. cropland.
- Sustained improvement of land use efficiency by increasing productivity on U.S. cropland, conserving native habitat, and enhancing landscape quality.
- Sustained contribution to solving regional water quality problems as evidenced by reductions in sediment, phosphorus, nitrogen and pesticide loads from U.S. cropland.
- Sustained reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. cropland per unit of output.
- Sustained contribution to solving regional water scarcity problems through continual improvement in irrigation water use efficiency and conservation.
- Sustained improvement in energy use efficiency from U.S. crop production.
To achieve these goals, Field to Market will seek to engage 20 percent of productive acres of U.S. commodity crop production—equivalent to 50 million acres—in its supply chain sustainability program by 2020.
Field to Market provides measurement tools and resources for growers and the supply chain that track and promote continuous improvement at the farm level through its supply chain sustainability program. The program promotes a voluntary, collaborative approach to sustainability that is expressly science-based, technology neutral and focused on outcomes that are within a grower’s control. This approach continues to gain support from stakeholders across the agricultural supply chain.
In November, Field to Market signed a memorandum of understanding with The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) to work toward greater harmonization of metrics in overlapping product categories, encourage data platform interoperability and collaborate together on innovation projects. This partnership will enable Field to Market’s metrics and benchmarks, developed through a multi-stakeholder process, to be utilized in reporting against TSC’s key performance indicators on continuous improvement in corn, cotton, rice, potatoes, soybeans and other crops in keeping with a number of sustainability indicators.
Through its long list of member grower organizations, leading companies, academia, conservation groups and public sector partners, Field to Market seeks to create opportunities across the agricultural supply chain for continuous improvement in productivity, environmental quality and human well-being. Using the metrics and benchmarks of the Fieldprint® Calculator, Field to Market’s supply chain sustainability program focuses on benchmarking and collecting data on current sustainability outcomes, catalyzing continuous improvement at the field and landscape level, and enabling supply chain sustainability claims through data aggregation.
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Founder & Principal Consultant, Hower Impact
Mike Hower is the founder of Hower Impact — a boutique consultancy delivering best-in-class strategic communication advisory and support for corporate sustainability, ESG and climate tech.
Published Dec 9, 2014 10am EST / 7am PST / 3pm GMT / 4pm CET