New Metrics

Field to Market, The Sustainability Consortium Partnering to Harmonize Metrics for Sustainable Agriculture

Across the entire agricultural supply chain — from the farm to the store shelf — the challenge of meeting demand for a rapidly growing population, while conserving natural resources, necessitates a harmonized, science-based approach to measure and communicate sustainability in agriculture. On Friday, Field to Market®: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture announced a partnership with The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) aimed at achieving this goal.

By Sustainable Brands | Published 10 years ago | About a 2 minute read

Across the entire agricultural supply chain — from the farm to the store shelf — the challenge of meeting demand for a rapidly growing population, while conserving natural resources, necessitates a harmonized, science-based approach to measure and communicate sustainability in agriculture. On Friday, Field to Market**®**: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture announced a partnership with The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) aimed at achieving this goal.

In a memorandum of understanding signed last week, TSC and Field to Market agreed 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.

“The partnership with The Sustainability Consortium is an important step in Field to Market’s efforts to create a common framework to measure the sustainability of U.S. agriculture. This move toward alignment will help the agriculture value chain communicate more clearly to consumers while creating a foundation to advance sustainable outcomes in U.S. crop production,” said Rod Snyder, president of Field to Market.

Through its diverse membership of 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. Leveraging 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.

“The Sustainability Consortium is built on a foundation of collaboration and alignment. A strong partnership between TSC and Field to Market will allow us to openly share information and harmonize our approaches to measuring the sustainability of key agricultural crops,” said TSC CEO Sheila Bonini. “We are pleased to have Field to Market as a partner and look forward to working with them as we help companies all across the supply chain capture the big opportunities sustainability has to offer.”