We’ve taken a core requirement for creating a successful business and used it as a marketing campaign. And because everyone is overusing the word sustainability, the meaning of it has been lost. Trying to nail down today’s definition of sustainability is like trying to nail down a cloud. Every time someone tries to put a definition to it, someone else uses it in a different way.
But what should sustainability mean from the lens of farming (yes, they are businesses too). Sustainability at its basic level is creating a robust farming enterprise that can withstand the pressures of everyday life.
And today’s pressures are mounting like never before. Between shifting weather patterns due to global warming, unbalanced supply and demand for commodity crops, increased regulation on water, fertilizers, and pesticides, and supply chain disruptions, the agricultural landscape is tough. Add the challenges of succession planning, high debt, and low income, and it becomes clear: the traditional farming model isn’t enough.
How do we as entrepreneurs, founders, and researchers help create a robust food supply chain? By making products aimed at sustainability (wait what!?!)
Yes, I know, I just said we overuse it. But here’s what I think.
If your company is creating products for farmers that:
Will help create a resilient farm enterprise
Will help create an agile farm enterprise
Will help create a diverse farm enterprise
Then you are creating a product that will help farmers, ranchers, and producers remain sustainable – capable of withstanding the pressures of everyday life.
We must be able to offer agriculture options and to do so, we must make a space for alternative products like biologicals. We must stop this cycle of new biological companies entering the market, fail after 5 years, and leave farmers frustrated at the time spent vetting a new technology that they no longer have access to. It’s a waste. It’s a waste of time, money, energy, and trust. And unfortunately, we are at the point where we must regain the trust that a few have broken.
So how can we do that?
We need to create niche products instead of universal products.
We need to form critical partnerships to show trust among ourselves inside the industry.
We need to stop marketing our products as “not theirs.” Instead of selling your product as better than your competitor, we need to tell the story of what the product actually is. Telling someone what your product ISN’T doesn’t mean people know what it is.
Producing a farmer-first product isn’t the only thing we must consider either. Gone are the days that we produce a product, put it on the market, and hope to gain sales. We must consider how the farmer will sell their end product. The product our product helped grow. If we want sustainable or regenerative farming products, we must create an avenue for those farming products to remain outside of today’s food supply chain.
How it Actually Works
Okay, okay what am I talking about? Consider the broccoli that you buy from large retail stores like Walmart as a river. A river of broccoli. Rivers are created from smaller, individual creeks that come together to form the large, gushing, earth moving rivers. Now think of individual broccoli farms as the creeks. Broccoli gets shipped from the individual farms to an aggregation site where the river of broccoli gets distributed to retailers. That momentum is what keeps the system moving. Damn up the retailer, the system gets flooded - all this broccoli with nowhere to go with it. Damn up the creeks, the system dries up.
Now think of all the individual farms contributing to the river. Anything one farmer does in their part of the supply chain gets diluted in the raging river of the other broccoli. This means regenerative or sustainable broccoli gets mixed together with conventional broccoli. Right now, there is no scalable way to remove that value-added broccoli out of the raging river. Best case scenario is that we hand them tiny little floaties in hopes that when it arrives at the retail gates, we can pluck it out of the raging river.
How do we stop this river… we don’t.
What we need is to form secondary routes to retail or other outlets that distribute broccoli. We need to create a resilient, agile, and diverse food supply chain that supports resilient, agile, and diverse farming enterprises. If we don’t accomplish these in parallel, then both with struggle. This is sustainability. This is what sustainability should mean and the definition I choose to strive for.
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