What’s on the horizon for the maturing sustainable ag movement?
Insights from the 2024 Sustainable Ag Summit
Farms are increasingly integrating renewable electricity generation into their facilities and landscapes.
By: Spencer Rubino-Finn
A Ten-Year Reunion
Ten years ago, a group of passionate agriculture folks came together for two days to discuss strategies and solutions for making that passion more sustainable. This diverse crowd of academics, public sector employees, farmers, and corporations descended upon Minneapolis for, what was then, the first annual Sustainable Agriculture Summit. Titled “Global Challenges, Local Solutions” the conference featured keynote speakers, networking sessions, and farmer-led panels. A decade later, the event returned to the Twin Cities, packed with the same level of industry insight and charm, albeit with a noticeably larger crowd in attendance (local hotels, rejoice!). This time around the theme was “A Decade of Progress and a Vision for the Future”, detailing what has changed in agriculture since 2015 and outlining a path forward for the next decade of progress.
The Grow Well Team decided to make the trip cross country, spending one day team building (who knew escape rooms could be so fun?) and the other at the last day of the conference. Enjoy some of the highlights of Day 2 of the summit below!
New Life for Life Cycle Assessments
Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) have become a common tool for evaluating environmental impacts and improving impact reporting at the product level, particularly in an industry as interconnected as food and agriculture. However, there is still plenty of work to be done in improving their accuracy. Featuring speakers from POET and the Argonne National Laboratory, the session titled “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Harmonization for the U.S. Animal Feed Industry” identified several areas for improvement:
Standardized Data – The key theme of this presentation was increasing the level of “harmony” in the entire LCA process. While models like GREET offer some level of standardization, there is still a massive range of outcomes possible depending on the inputs used. The scope of crop data in particular can vary widely from data set to data set, making LCA comparisons nearly impossible. Increasing standardization will improve accuracy and repeatability of emissions quantification. There is some help on the way: organizations like IFEEDER, the U.S. animal feed industry association, are rolling out LCA toolkits centered around agriculture and a new federal LCA Commons dataset coming in two years should increase harmonization throughout the field. Standards set forth by ISO can be helpful as well.
Supply Chain Focused Collaboration –in order to really move the needle on LCAs, the speakers highlighted the need for supply chain-specific assessments in favor of a generalized approach that too often leverages emissions factors with little relevance to the product in question. As the supply chains for agricultural products become more and more complex, the need to fully evaluate these unintended methodological impacts increases. Scope 3 emissions often make up the majority of large companies’ GHG emissions. This supply chain specific approach requires more intentional collaboration, and requires private companies to share data. However, the group made it clear that this is not an impossible task. Firms in sectors like petfood and aquaculture, in addition to their traditional biofuel customers, are asking POET for an LCA of their protein products. As market requirements for LCA data increases, so will collaboration.
Collaboration up & down the supply chain is crucial for LCA
Cost Sharing Is Key
The USDA’s Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative provided many in the agricultural community with funding for projects in an effort to reduce GHG emissions from farming while increasing production benefits. So far, it appears one of the best outcomes of the project is funding to experiment. A session titled “Partnering for Supply Chain Progress: How the Right Partners Best Accelerate Sustainability Progress”, featured an insightful testimonial from a Minnesota Pork farmer who emphasized the importance of experimentation. His Climate Smart project focused on cover cropping a portion of his land in order to enrich the soil and improve its long-term health. He mentioned that because cover cropping reduced his yields, he would never have been able to implement this practice without the level of cost-sharing that the USDA, and companies like Nestle, provided. Public-Private partnerships are key for alleviating the financial risk that many sustainable practices can pose. Maintaining the financial commitment to sustainable agriculture is another key to the next decade of progress.
What’s Next?
One of the last sessions at the Summit was a roundtable featuring four college students who spoke on their studies in agriculture and how Gen Z is viewing sustainability as a whole. Topics ranged from volunteer opportunities they found helpful to generating insightful sustainability content. Passion and advocacy are nurtured and formed at the college level, and it was inspiring to see that many still in school are ready to devote their professional lives to improving agriculture and reducing emissions. Particularly with the uncertainty of the new Administration and the 2030 target set by the UN to cut emissions in half nearing, it can be easy to feel discouraged about the future of sustainability. I was even expecting some of the general attitudes at the summit to be somber or uneasy. However, these students along with the entire group at the summit, did not seem any less motivated or driven in their work. It was a good reminder that there are still plenty of hard-working people in this field who are eager to collaborate in hope of achieving more sustainable agricultural practices.
Record Scratch… A Trump Second Term
I wrote the above conclusion prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th President of the United States, thinking that things would move slowly at the start of his term, and my optimistic outlook would remain intact. The administration clearly had other plans and I felt that Trump’s flurry of executive orders and ensuing federal chaos required an addendum to the blog. There were two questions in particular I wanted to find answers to: what are the state of USDA Climate Smart projects and how impacted is the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate/sustainable funding? Regarding the former, the future seems grim at worst, and murky at best. The landing page for USDA Climate Smart Commodities has been taken down (though the project dashboard still exists), along with countless other mentions of the word "climate" - a directive from the Trump team to remove sustainable ideas from federal agencies. How long the page will be down is currently unknown at this time. The money appropriated by the IRA, appears to have a more hopeful outcome. A recent piece by NPR describes energy & climate policy as complex and slow. This means that it may be hard for Trump to abruptly reverse the clean energy policies that the IRA has funded. Furthermore, the article goes on to state that Trump will need to go through Congress to pause all the money that has been appropriated by the IRA and other pieces of Biden-passed infrastructure legislation. Much of this funding has benefited “red” states as well, which could disincentivize Trump’s Republican counterparts in Congress to fully hit pause. Negotiating with Congress also appears to be something Trump has no real appetite for at the moment, perhaps due to his slim House majority or fear for another potential John McCain “thumbs down” moment on the Capitol floor. These factors could result in the IRA lasting longer than some other federal climate initiatives.
The fate of federal sustainability programs are in flux under the new Administration
With certain words being erased and entire web pages removed, there is understandably a state of confusion and fear about the future of sustainability at the federal level. While we are certainly in a new state of play, the slow moving gears of policy change and the ensuing battle over the legality of Trump’s orders makes any decisive conclusions hard to draw at the moment. Regardless, the Trump Administration has already taken several actions including withdrawing from the Paris Agreement that indicate it will be up to the private sector and communities to lead on emissions reductions and environmental stewardship.
