Measuring Performance in Smallholder Chains: 
A practical workshop on emerging best practices for tracking farm level sustainability 

"I found it to be an engaging and thought-provoking two days, leaving me with a great deal to reflect on…Thank you for the opportunity to highlight the work we are doing and to get feedback from the impressive group of people you bring together."

—Debra Rosenthal Shapira, Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers
 

On December 6 and 7, 2012, the Sustainable Food Lab gathered a diverse group from brand manufacturers, certifiers, traders, lenders, researchers and NGOs at the Mars, Inc.headquarters in Mclean, Virginia to share and learn about emerging best practices in monitoring sustainability performance in smallholder supply chains.

Performance monitoring allows insight into the farm level reality of smallholders, and how key aspects of livelihood and environmental stewardship may change over time. Many of our partners are engaged in performance monitoring, and the Sustainable Food Lab brought these practitioners together to stimulate dialogue about ways we could find common approaches and improve the quality of this work.

The organizations that came together share a belief that building more visibility between farmers and buyers can be an important component of sustainable sourcing. With more insight into basic farm-level performance, buyers can better understand the economic and ecological sustainability status of smallholder production in their supply chains. Subsequently, these buyers can see where partnerships are needed to make improvements. Without tracking change over time, NGOs, foundations, and companies can’t learn effectively about the results of their investments in farmers and producer organizations. And finally, for small-scale farmers in long supply chains, a better understanding of their buyers and a connection to commercial and sustainability values helps them better invest for the future.

Workshop participants looked at a handful of case studies of the most exciting and innovative performance measurement pilots currently in the field, and used those as a springboard for discussing the challenges they face operating from different parts of agricultural supply chain.

Cases were presented by Root Capital, the Grameen Foundation, Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers, Unilever, the World Cocoa Foundation and the Sustainable Food Lab.

Some of the issues discussed included:

•    How to "embed" performance monitoring into the supply chain;

•    The trade-off between efficiency and rigorous data collection: when each is appropriate and why;

•    The development of consistent and commonly accepted performance monitoring metrics;

•    How performance monitoring can create value for producers and producer organizations;

•    The role of certification in performance monitoring; and

•    Existing barriers to collaboration on performance monitoring.

A common framework for understanding performance measurement and the challenges it puts forth enabled a wholly engaged group of participants.

Participants came away with a better understanding of the types of performance measurement being done within smallholder supply chains, as well as a sense of where their work overlaps with that of other supply chain actors. Many participants made plans to continue engagement with one another around this topic in order to increase efficiencies, share resources and knowledge, and prevent duplication of efforts.

The Food Lab will continue to offer opportunities for exchange on this topic. We will be publishing an open source methodology guide and generic tools for performance monitoring in 2013.  Please get in touch if you would like more information on this topic: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Can We Bring 50% of the World's Wild Fish Under Sustainable Management in 10 Years?

Over the last year the Sustainable Food Lab helped convene a new collaboration to achieve a 10-year target to bring 50 percent of fisheries and the global catch under sustainable management while increasing economic benefits by US$20B annually. At a Design Workshop in Vancouver November 6-8, 2012, representatives of 36 organizations came together to work on:

• A common framework for targeting investment in fisheries and the incubation of collaborative initiatives; 

• A process for continuous learning, communication and coordination that will help focus fishery improvement efforts and draw on collective strengths;  

• A list of opportunities for collaboration in specific types of fisheries. 

Food Lab staff are proud to have helped with design and facilitation of a year-long process to develop this initiative, which will now be led by a steering committee representing a wide range of key players in the system.

Please visit the 50 in 10 website for further details on achieving the goal, the members of the collaboration and the ongoing work of the collaborative. http://www.sustainablefoodlab.org/50in10 

"We are all embarking on journey we have not seen before. We have come together to change the oceans. I came because I care personally, but I will go home to Nissui to say we are in an initiative we want to follow and be committed to."

—Volker Kuntzsch, President Nippon Suisan USA, CEO King & Prince Seafood


“Government leaders are tired of having piecemeal approaches by every single little project, and not seeing them come together for really deep transformational change. If you want transformational change, you need to change the way you partner with each other….that is what I’m witnessing here.”

—Juergen Voegele, Director, Agriculture and Environmental Services (AES), The World Bank

Costco Organic Egg Suppliers Use the Cool Farm Tool to Reduce GHG Emissions

If you go into a Costco store anywhere in the U.S, the organic eggs you’ll find on the shelf will have a climate story to tell. For the past two years the organic egg producers supplying Costco stores have been using the Cool Farm Tool to gain insight into the carbon emissions of their operations. With support from the Sustainable Food Lab, Costco has engaged its entire supply base in a program designed to spur reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of organic eggs.

A distinguishing feature of this program is its participatory and interactive nature. In many carbon accounting exercises, the accounting is a “black box”, with only the result—a “carbon footprint”—returned to the operation. Other similar exercises calculate the carbon for each supplier in isolation. This program, on the other hand, has learning and collaboration at its core.

In this program, the Costco organic egg suppliers receive the tools and training to do self-assessments and run “what-if” scenarios. Using the Cool Farm Tool, the farmers determine their overall emissions receive a breakdown of emissions by source so they can see what contributes the most. From here the farmers can start to map out emissions reduction pathways and test reduction potentials.

Costco and the Sustainable Food Lab supplement these individual farm assessments with annual summits, bringing the suppliers together to review and discuss their experiences, ideas and results. From crop dirt to retail store, the farmers can compare their performance to others in each emissions category and in aggregate. 

The growers are quick to take advantage of these opportunities to ask questions, troubleshoot problems and, share ideas. One farmer introduced an idea to create a better racking system for the delivery trucks in order to increase the transport efficiency. Another farmer said, “We changed our feed ration to more of a wheat-based diet and found that this had a real impact on lowering our overall emissions. We’re wondering if other farms found this.”

There are no external targets imposed but the structure of the annual assessments coupled with annual meetings seems to give the farmers the motivation they need to strive for continuous improvement on one of the most urgent issues of our time—climate change.

A participating farmer said, "This is helping us improve. I really appreciate value of having a baseline so we can see our strengths and weaknesses and feel challenged to improve."

Food companies today have a difficult challenge of engaging their supply chains effectively on issues of sustainability beyond existing standards and certifications.  The Cool Farm Tool provides buyers with a concrete way to engage suppliers. The outreach buyers do using the Cool Farm Tool can also provide the foundation for building on additional sustainability issues and structuring a framework for continuous improvement.

The Cool Farm Tool (CFT) in its present form is an Excel-based greenhouse gas calculator. The CFT is free for growers to help them measure the carbon footprint of crop and livestock products (see www.coolfarmtool.org for more information). Unlike many other agricultural greenhouse gas calculators, the CFT includes calculations of soil carbon sequestration, an important mechanism for both mitigation and adaptation benefits.

Many users look to the Tool for carbon footprinting or as a metric for agricultural GHG’s from suppliers. The Tool can be used for these purposes but the strength of the Cool Farm Tool lies in its capacity to engage suppliers. With the Tool in hand buyers can provide suppliers with a technical watering hole around which to gather for discussions on impacts and options. It also provides the entre for educational workshops on a range of sustainability issues. The Tool requires input data but for suppliers with “audit fatigue” the ability to receive immediate results and run test cases is a refreshing change.

For Costco, the organic egg supply chain project is an experiment. Sheri Flies is Costco’s assistant general merchandise manager said, “For us, this is just a first step. We’re testing this out on our organic egg program but depending on how it goes, we’re interested in rolling this out on many more of our products and regions.”

Early results are encouraging. Although the farmers expressed concern about matching these results next year, a year one to year two comparison showed an impressive absolute reduction of 7.2 percent.

One farm was able to show a 25 percent reduction in feed emissions due to an increase in the wheat portion of the feed ration. Another farmer showed a transportation emission reduction of 30 percent (and overall reduction of 15 percent) as a result of sourcing a higher percentage of his feed from a more local source. 

The results show that feed emissions (the embedded emissions from feed production) are the largest singe source of emissions for most farms and for the supply chain in aggregate. Transportation of the feed, from field to mill and from mill to farm is the second largest contributor.

In the course of the project Costco organic egg suppliers have also received educational content on climate change and been learning together about biochar and the importance of the production practices on the farms where they source their feed.

From increasing local organic production to sharing information about the fiber threshold of increased alfalfa and wheat in the feed ration, this conscientious group of organic egg suppliers is on a path to increased sustainability and glad to have a tool and a program by which to measure and motivate continuous improvement.

The farmers used the opportunity to discuss the finer points of production: the problem of overloading the hens with wheat fiber, the benefit of wheat meal over pellets, the trade-offs between wheat and an increase in dry matter intake the possibilities of introducing a better stacking system on the trucks to accommodate the Costco packaging, the decreasing supply of organic feed due to higher conventional grain prices. There were some of the barriers and opportunities that surfaced.

Announcements

A new report from the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, entitled Methods for quantification of emissions at the landscape level for developing countries in smallholder contexts, gives an overview of approaches that have been taken to date for landscape-scale GHG quantification, covering both measurement and modelling and the reliance of one upon the other.  



LINKing Smallholders: A guide to inclusive business models 

Agriculture is a source of livelihoods for an estimated 2.5 billion people globally. It provides jobs for 1.3 billion smallholders and landless workers. Thus, it has enormous potential to reduce rural poverty. Yet agribusinesses are usually built around a small number of large-scale suppliers ignoring that 85% of the world’s farms are managed by small-scale producers.

The LINK methodology is based on: a) direct experiences of research projects in several countries in Latin America and Africa; b) more than twenty business model case studies which have proved to work for small-scale producers; and, c) the growing literature around business models as a design/development tool to augment the effectiveness of business processes to fight poverty.

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