It’s About Trade-Offs: Hard Questions from the Sustainable Foods Summit (Part 1)

• Can you preserve the soil by switching to no-till farming if it means you can’t use organic methods?
• Which is more sustainable: a lightweight plastic bag made from virgin materials (i.e., petroleum), or a plastic clamshell using 40 times as much material, but made from recycled water bottles?
• If biodegradable (PLA) plastics are made from GMO (genetically modified organism) corn, are they any better than non-biodegradable plastic?
• Is organic enough of a standard, or do we hold out for the much stricter but much rarer Demeter Biodynamic certification?
• Are food-industry giants squeezing out small artisan brands, or opening up new opportunities for them?
• And can we achieve a food system that combines the artisan quality and chemical/petroleum independence of pre-20th century food production with the massive volume and ability to feed hungry people of the 20th century Green Revolution, while achieving the distribution necessary to end hunger?

These are some of the questions attendees at the Sustainable Foods Summit grappled with on January 18 and 19, 2011 in San Francisco.

Conference presenters included a number of certification agencies and a few consultants (including me on the marketing side) as well as producers and retailers both from major companies like Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, Safeway and White Wave (whose brands include Silk and Horizon) as well as much smaller companies like Theo Chocolate and Washington State’s Stone-Buhr Flour.

Some of the things I hadn’t heard before:

• It’s well-known that cows are a huge source of methane emissions (a worse climate change problem than CO2)—but I hadn’t known that cow burps cause almost twice the emissions of cow manure, and that cow burping can be greatly reduced through feeding the cows a healthier organic grass-based diet rich in flax, which also raises the Omega-3 level in the milk (a good thing).
• Cows fed a healthy organic diet live an average of three times as long and have more lactation cycles; this translates directly into increased profitability of the farmer.
• Organic farming can sequester 7000 pounds per acre of CO2 per year.
• By converting some acreage to oilseed crops such as sunflowers, farms can supply a goodly percentage of their energy needs, feed cows, and gather the seeds as a cash crop. (These four bullets from Theresa Marquez of Organic Valley dairy cooperative; the percentages on cow emissions were from Bree Johnson of Straus Family Creamery)
• Makers of biodegradable plastics often source from GMO corn. (Adrianna Michael, Organic and Wellness News)
• No-till farming vastly reduces soil erosion (which can lower the altitude of a conventional farm by more than a foot in 40 years), but is difficult to do without chemical weed control.
• Organic, interplanted, and no-till soil hold a lot more water, and look, smell, and even taste healthier than conventional soil.
• Some private-label supermarket brands, including Safeway’s O Organics, are now being marketed through other retail channels not owned by the original company. (Alex Petrov, Safeway)
• Even though it’s more expensive to start with, you get 20% more yield from a natural beef patty compared to a conventional one, which makes progress toward evening out the price. (Maisie Greenawalt: Bon Appetit Management Company, an institutional food service provider for colleges, museums, and corporate cafeterias)

(This report will continue tomorrow)

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.