The Importance of Communicating Your Sustainability Story

September 28, 2021

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by Emily Smith (Trust in Food) During Farm Journal’s 2021 Sustainable Produce Summit that took place earlier this month, a key theme of effectively communicating sustainable food and agriculture stories to consumers came through again and again. As specialty crop growers and food retailers make changes to meet both environmental needs and consumer requests, there have been hits and misses in storytelling.

In a conference session titled, “Stop the Greenwashing: Best Practices for Communicating Sustainability,” a panel of speakers offered best practices for talking about sustainability goals.

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One insight that resonated with me is this: Mindset is important in any sustainability journey. Sustainability rarely happens on an A-to-B path. Instead, it is complex, multifaceted and requires an openness to continuous improvement based on new information. What’s not helpful is greenwashing—defined in the webinar as a practice in which a person (or an organization) shares part but not all of their sustainability story, which in turn might make them seem more environmentally attuned than they are.

Conversely, focusing on one aspect of sustainability can also open doors of opportunity. In our work at Trust In Food™, we have found that many farmers who incorporate at least one regenerative practice such as no-till or cover crops are open to considering what else they might do to increase their farm’s sustainability. The national America’s Conservation Ag Movement (ACAM) partnership program that our team leads enlists the help of Conservation Steward farmers to help activate change in their communities.

One such Conservation Steward, Brian Scott of Indiana, shared in an article earlier this year his motivations for taking some land out of production and instead planting a pollinator habitat. Brian had already moved into no-till and cover crops and had taken advantage of programs through the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and Farm Service Agency. This article illustrates the mindset of a farmer seeking ways to do more.

As Trust In Food’s community engagement coordinator, I focus on prioritizing and amplifying our farmers’ sustainability stories to celebrate accomplishments and give credit where credit is due; inspire others to make and meet sustainability goals in their own businesses or farms; and demonstrate practical lessons other farmers can learn from their peers and apply to their operations. READ MORE

ACAM Executive Q&A: Jon Doggett, CEO, National Corn Growers Association (Trust in Food)

Cargill introduces new revenue stream for farmers as part of 10 million acre regenerative agriculture commitment -- Cargill RegenConnectTM links farmers to the emerging carbon marketplace and helps scale the voluntary adoption of regenerative ag practices (The Fence Post)

Recipes for Food Security | ‘Word of mouth still means a lot’: How sustainability spreads (Planet Forward)

Excerpt from Trust in Food: I remember being in the back at the staff table in 1300 Longworth, which is the hearing room for the very powerful U.S. House Agriculture Committee back in 1989. There was this thing called Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture (LISA). My boss was a farmer from northeastern Montana, and he kept saying, ‘It needs to be High-Input Sustainable Agriculture.’ I just remember hearing from that point on about sustainability.

I wish I had a dime for every time I heard a farmer or someone in ag say, ‘We don’t want Walmart or Amazon to tell us what sustainability is. That’s our job.’ We sat on it a long time. We didn’t do it. Over the last 10 years, we’ve kind of started warming up. It isn’t that we weren’t doing the right stuff. It’s that we weren’t talking about it. If you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist in the world.

One of the reasons I like talking about sustainability is that it gives us an opportunity to talk about the great things our growers are doing. That’s kind of cool because it’s been embraced across society, across our economy by a wide variety of people. It’s so easy to engage in the sustainability discussion. It gives us a platform.

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Reading a lot of history shows how much conflict has been created around accessing resources. Talking about sustainability in the broadest sense helps define how we will interact with one another and have access to those economic resources.

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I see the challenge to more conservation being in the economic sustainability that we have to have. When we had those commodity price upswings 10 to 11 years ago, we started seeing this really cool thing: People were making money, and kids came back to the farm.

That does two things: First, the kid comes back and challenges dad or grandpa, ‘Let’s try something new, let’s try a new conservation practice, I heard about this in school.’ They look at things with fresh eyes and have that conversation in the shop or around the supper table. Second, they have to have enough profit in the organization to bring the kid back to the farm and to do new things in conservation. There’s a little risk there. With a little profit, ‘We’ll try this for a couple of years. It isn’t going to break us.’ You’ve got to have some profit to incentivize people.

One of the things I’ve been pushing for is to get more of our younger growers involved. It’s also OK for dad to go to Corn Growers meetings so the kid can run the farm for a couple days. My dad was a county commissioner and on the bank board, and my brother absolutely loved it. Dad was gone a couple days every other week, so he could run the farm. We continue to need new blood.

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In 2019, NCGA formed a Corn Sustainability Advisory Group. This group—comprised largely of U.S. corn farmers—were instrumental in all decision-making, including setting the sustainability goals. It was a farmer-led process. That’s really important as well.

How are corn farmers feeling and thinking about climate, carbon and regenerative ag, and where do they see themselves fitting in? What can the industry do to meet corn farmers where they are on these issues where historical barriers to conversation might have existed because of the terms we use to talk about sustainability?

It’s now a subject that is openly discussed in our meetings but, importantly, discussed in a few coffee shops around the country. We were cool kids before we knew we were cool kids. We are a little bit different than, say, potatoes or tart cherries that are more direct to the consumer. Not many people eat field corn.

Some of our downstream partners at companies—a sustainability officer or vice president or whatever their title might be—talk about what it is that they need. The issue with that is, do they want practices, or do they want outcomes?

Outcomes are a much better way to go. If you do practices, you can do cover crops in Missouri, but it’s really hard to do cover crops in North Dakota. The one-size-fits-all approach or the mandates that make no agronomic sense really turn our folks off. Give us where you want us to go, and we’ll get there.

We don’t have anything to hide. Our folks work toward sustainability and know that the product or commodity they’re producing is of high quality, and that it’s sustainably grown. Corn plants are a wonderful thing: They take air and put it in the ground.

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We have 160,000 gas stations in this country. We have 260 to 270 million light-duty vehicles in this country, almost all of which are internal-combustion driven. We’re not going to turn that around next year, or in 10 years, or in 20 years, or in 30 years.

There are two things we would like. We want an opportunity to have more ethanol in the tank because the addition of ethanol has good environmental impacts.

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We have farmers involved in ethanol plants, and they’ve validated this. They can raise the corn crop, sequester enough carbon to raise that crop to offset the production of the corn, transport corn to the ethanol plant, take the corn and make it into ethanol. It’s a zero-sum game. Petroleum guys can’t say that. That’s not true in every ethanol plant, but we’re getting there. We’re the solution for today.

No. 2 is we want a level playing field. If you want to compare a car burning 15% ethanol and a car being powered by a coal-fired plant, those are two very different things. Where are they getting the electricity from? We think that ought to be looked at. Where are the metals coming from for those batteries and the other components of that vehicle? There’s a lot of things we need to look at.

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Find opportunities to tell your story to somebody who’s never heard this story—that person sitting next to you, at the grocery store. READ MORE