2020 Year in Review
Whew, what a year it has been! It’s been quite some time since I had a moment to post an update, but this inauguration morning feels like the perfect moment to reflect on Grow Well’s first full year of business, as I look ahead to a busy and purposeful 2021.
So, what did Grow Well do over the last year?
Some days, as I volley between writing comments on proposed food and ag regulations, reviewing and analyzing data on the last 50 years of cropping trends in the Upper Mississippi, to calls with collaborators in the Philippines to discuss tuna fishery improvement; I lay in bed and wonder what it is I don’t do. This rich diversity of projects, collaborators, and clients has provided a most interesting set of challenges that has pushed me and my practice to grow, learn, and engage on food and agriculture issues in a variety of ways. Looking back over the last year, I feel immense gratitude for the work and work products I’ve had a chance to create and collaborate on and am happy to summarize a few of my favorites.
Foot printing for an indoor ag company - This project entailed scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas, waste, and water foot-printing of facilities in New Jersey and Maryland. This passionate, growth-stage business provided wonderful partnership and dedicated engagement throughout. Gathering the data and translating learnings into meaningful metrics was no small task, which made me extra grateful to be able to bring on Ozgem Ornektekin of Ko2 and Harry Etra of HXE Partners to provide the dynamic and creative thought partnership to extend protocols and methodologies designed for much more established and slow-growing entities to meet the needs of such a young, and fast-growing start-up. I could not have been more excited to hear from the sponsoring executives last month that they had taken our findings and made the move to source their electricity from renewable sources. I look forward to seeing this company continue to make measurable strides on their sustainability journey.
Urban American food insecurity and food waste analysis and paper writing - Diving into data on the full extent of poverty and food insecurity in the midst of this spring’s unprecedented COVID-driven job losses was an experience equal parts sobering and impactful. While the results of this research and writing project could have been deeply depressing should they have stopped there, the project also entailed exploring the extent of under-utilized food in various non-residential sectors across those same 22 cities spanning a range of sizes and geographies. In addition to the socially and economically meaningful dimensions of this project, I also enjoyed the opportunity to crack open my multivariate stats notes and books and write some R code to do the cluster analyses that support this paper. The paper’s been through one round of reviews and revisions, and I look forward to being able to share a link to the published final version soon.
Supporting IFT’s Global Food Traceability Center’s development and piloting of the GDST standards which launched in March 2020 - Seafood and traceability were definitely areas where I spent less time, prior to launching my practice, so the opportunity to learn this space and bring in some of the skills I honed running the food procurement team at Blue Apron has been a satisfying way to both build new technical skills, and apply old business strategy and analytical skills. One of my favorite work products on this on-going engagement is an ROI calculator tool to explore the costs and benefits of digital, interoperable, traceability system adoption for different scales of businesses operating at different stages of seafood supply chains. It’s been delightful to be able to continue building on those learnings through on-going primary data collection and literature reviews supporting drafting of a paper to be submitted later this quarter.
Regional Ag System Diversification Impact and Strategy - This project, undertaken with collaborators, sustainable supply chain expert Jessie Deelo of Deelo Consulting and ag economist Michelle Klieger of Stratagerm Consulting, has been a fascinating deep dive into what happened to diversity and ecosystem functionality in the Upper Mississippi River Basin over the last 50 years, and how crop diversity could address water quality and climate concerns. It was fun to pour over decades of data, summarizing the scale of needed change in the region at 30 million acres. Yet, additional simulations I got to craft in COMET and NTT showed crop diversification can solve these vast water quality and climate challenges. Last week, I was excited to see the first phase of our work go live on the Walton Family Foundation’s site. I look forward to seeing two subsequent chapters come out over the next few months.
Dimensionalizing Butter Meat Co.’s Impact and Potential - Dairy cows, particularly those who spend their lives grazing responsibly managed pastures here in the Northeast have always held a special spot in my heart and professional interests. They were the inspiration and focus of my dissertation at Penn State, where I got to measure how exactly perennial pastures outperformed corn in terms of both greater resilience to the increasingly frequent extreme rainfall events climate change has brought this region, as well as lower greenhouse gas emissions due to less tillage-driven spring nitrification. But perhaps my cow love is just cultural. With the undeniably English last name of Grantham, a dear friend once chided when I expressed my undying love of cheese, “Well, you are English, and they’re pretty much one with the cows.” Jokes and personal passion aside, Jill Gould, founder and CEO of Butter Meat Co. has struck on a model and developed a vision for cow care, a diversified product portfolio, and customer impact that also carries big benefits for the environment and diversifies economic opportunities for dairy farmers. Guiding her through quantification of some of these benefits via literature review, simulation modeling with DairyGEM, and nutritional testing of her beef allowed us to see just how much promise this systemic model of sustainable beef in the Northeast has to offer. From a GHG footprint that’s as much as 50% lower than dedicated herd beef, to the superior impacts on water quality afforded by a rotational, pasture-based production system, it was deeply gratifying to see how much this model has to offer from an environmental perspective. Benefits and potential doesn’t end there, though. Results of nutritional testing and comparison to reference samples in the USDA’s database point to differentiated vitamin and nutrient levels in this beef, consistent with benefits reported for other grass-based beef, but including some new things as well such as higher protein and iron that we hypothesize may be related to the cow’s maturity and active lifestyle. Regardless, we’ve just begun to uncover the potential of this approach and I look forward to supporting Jill and her business as it grows.
Investor due diligence - Another area of work where I have found technical satisfaction and purpose is review of potential investments. Investors are increasingly interested in understanding the sustainability or environmental impacts of investments prior to deciding whether to make an investment. Helping investors quantify climate or water impacts has given me additional opportunities to use simulation modeling tools, which I find to be particularly useful in sorting out the green smearing from the good stuff. But, I’ve also appreciated these engagements for the opportunity they’ve presented to help my clients appreciate the broader landscape and see through some of the bluster that exists out there at a higher level.
So, it’s been a busy year and this upcoming year looks to be no different. I am so grateful to each and every one of my clients, collaborators, and contractors for the faith they’ve entrusted in me to do purposeful work, especially over a year filled with so many challenges. In this day filled with change and hope, let us go forward together and do the work we need to build a more sustainable, fair, and honest world.
