This week in the Irish Farmers Journal I wrote about what sustainability programmes can yield to food producers. Sustainability has been a buzz word bandied around liberally in the past decade. Unfortunately it has also been frequently abused by many food retailers and manufacturers.
More recently the term has gained renewed focus as commodity prices move sharply and continuously upwards. The scramble for land in developing countries to feed our Western appetites has become a contentious issue. Here in Ireland our chief food and drink marketing agency Bord Bia has put a sustainability programme into place. In the following analysis I spoke to farmers, Bord Bia and outside voices on what issues are involved. Of huge importance to farmers is looking at the costs of more form filling against the benefits that may come in the door in terms of farm income.
So what are those benefits? Is sustainability just a word for lovers of open-toed sandals? Or is it a way of farming in Ireland that could yield us huge benefits in the future.
Greening
the Shamrock; where’s the pound, shilling and pence?
Irish Farmers Journal Suzanne Campbell, 18th October 2012
Bord Bia’s Origin Green scheme had its “soft launch”
earlier this summer; promoting sustainability as something far from green and
woolly but as a hard business strategy for Irish food exports. As Ireland’s
clean food image is already a seller, what does ticking more boxes on waste and
emissions mean for Irish farmers? Is greening the shamrock a strategy that
works for big food, or can tracking sustainability create rewards that will filter
down to Irish farm incomes?
Sustainability
is safety, and Ireland’s track record on extensive production could be worth
more than we bargained for in a resource-strapped world under pressure to meet
demand for food. With a population of nine billion the global marketplace is a
huge opportunity for Irish exports. But it’s also placing pressure on basic but
limited resources like water and land.
The
new scramble for Africa is about land for growing food, and supplying Western
diets from developing countries creates complex issues. Ethiopia which farms
baby corn and mange tout for the UK and Ireland has suffered renewed hunger
this summer after drought. According to former UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan, hedge funds and other speculators bought African
farmland the size of France (over 210,000 square miles) in 2009. He
attacked the growing practice of “land grabbing” by which countries are buying
or leasing land in other nations to increase their own food security.
Food companies cannot afford to be labelled as unethical
in terms of where their food is produced and they also need to make sure that
the bottom won’t fall out of supply chains. This is where Ireland steps up to
the plate; we’ve plenty of rain, good grass and we’ve just began tracking
exactly what’s going in and out of the system.
In May of last year Bord Bia began auditing use of water,
energy, waste levels, animal feed and production practices on Irish farms. Beginning
with farmers in their Beef Quality Assurance Scheme, so far 30,000 members or
94% of QA producers have participating in the sustainability survey; the first national
assessment of environmental performance of farms worldwide.
One of the farmers involved in the auditing is Richard Hogge who farms sheep and
sucklers in Stonyford County Kilkenny. He views the scheme as worth getting
involved in, despite the additional workload. “There’s a fair bit of trust and
honesty on the farmer’s part as you’re putting in all your details and
costings, so I had to gather all that. Then it’s processed at the Bord Bia end
and I get a chart coming back to me outlining how my farm is performing on the
different elements.”
For Richard there were obvious rewards in seeing how
profitability could be improved. As he has 350 ewes on the farm and 25 sucklers,
it was clear from the feedback that his grass could be better utilised by
cattle but it didn’t suit his sheep enterprise. “I could have shorter time with
cattle indoors but as I need my grass for sheep outdoors all year this is
difficult to improve on. At the same time I compared well on how I’m finishing
my animals – little outside purchased concentrates, and I’m also getting a calf
per cow every year. If I considered a continental bull I might get more kilos
per hectare but might lose out on the better calving ratios and fattening from
my Angus bull. I’m getting the heifers away at 18 months and the bulls away at
20-22 months off grass. So it’s a balancing act.”
Richard came into the scheme from his involvement in Bord
Bia’s quality assurance schemes for his sucklers and sheep. “This was thrown in
front of me as an option and for me it wasn’t a hard choice as I’m involved in
nearly everything that can be done to improve my lot. For farmers there’s an
advantage that it’s showing you what can be improved with what you’re doing,
and ultimately that’s saving money ”.
Some of the top farmers taking part in the sustainability
programme were rewarded at the Ploughing last week in New Ross by Bord Bia, The
Irish Farmers Journal and Teagasc for efficiently producing cattle at a
suitable specifications for export. One of these winners was Michael
Murphy from Nenagh for his dairy calf to beef production. In a business where
profitability can be tricky, Michael found the auditing gave him an outside eye
on productivity on his farm.
“When the charts came back,
compared to the national average I was up there near the top which made me
think I was doing everything as near as good as I can. At first I didn’t know
much about carbon footprint and it is difficult for farmers to understand.
Sometimes they don’t think about details and may not have any plan in their
head about when they’re going to slaughter what they buy.”
For Michael tracking every
last figure is the only way his business works. The 200 calves he brings in
yearly are fed by machine which communicates with the calf’s electronic tag. He
also weighs them every two months.
“There is a definite time span for any animal
I have, you need to keep animals moving along and putting on weight everyday. I
can’t understand lads not weighing cattle, I suggested a weighing scales at a
discussion meeting and they called it a luxury, for me it’s essential. Overall
I found the experience a good one, and if other farmers are thinking about it
it will improve their efficiency without doubt.”
Jim O’Toole at Bord Bia was one of the driving forces of
the sustainability monitoring, previously working on the Quality Assurance
schemes. Quality Assurance has been a huge success for the marketing of Irish
food, and customer feedback shows shoppers identify with traceability and “safe
food” assurance. But why the move into the more “open-toed sandal” area of sustainability?
For O’Toole it was a natural progression from the monitoring they were already
doing.
“We did work that was completed in 2009 with some of the
bigger customers of Irish food – food service, retailing and manufacturing to
see how important sustainability was and we concluded it was an important
issue. Our natural production in Ireland would resonate with that perception,
but what we felt was that companies wanted more evidence.”
Bord Bia returned to the topic in 2010, asking
respondents again about sustainability. Instead of falling in importance as
recession dug in, it seemed sustainability had hardened in importance. For
customers of Irish food and particularly beef and dairy, sustainability was now
on the slate of key words and concepts, but what was driving the impulse for
food buyers?
“The debate about sustainability is often described as a
triple bottom line – environment, financial and social” says O’Toole. “If there
isn’t a financially sustainable supply chain that supply chain could break
down. There is also benefit from efficiencies by improving their environmental
performance in terms of reducing waste, energy etc so there’s a cost saving
there as well as enhancing brand value”
The scale of ambition of Origin Green is huge. To date
27,500 of Irish farms have had a carbon footprint assessment done. 45% of Irish
export food and drink production has signed up to the scheme; retailers, food
service operators, manufacturers, Unilever, Nestle, McDonalds, Danone and Tesco
are already involved. For retailers like Sainsburys with their “20 things for
2020” strategy, auditing our own sustainability on Irish farms can’t fail to be
an attraction as it means someone else doing the hard work for them. It’s a
move that has put Ireland ahead of the pack, potentially yielding us a
competitive advantage.
But farmers might ask - if retailers are so interested in
sustainable food chains, why don’t they just pay farmers more? Would Tesco’s
investment of £25 million in the Sustainable Consumption Institute at
University of Manchester be better spent rewarding extensive farming systems we
already have. Sustainability is clearly a great buzz word for retailers and at
the corporate table, but where or when is the payback?
“It’s too early to tell” says O’Toole. “The cheap food
debate isn’t one that isn’t going to get settled very quickly but from our
experience with this programme the buy in we are getting from farmers it means
Ireland can secure markets in the future. What we’ve got to do is prepare our
industry to compete and win business so it’s a strategic long term initiative.”
Padraig Brennan, senior information analyst with Bord Bia
has been working with Teagasc and understands that Origin Green needs to appeal
at farm level. “There’s no point in being environmentally sustainable if you
can’t make a living out of it. Being sustainable comes down to getting more
output from the same input, more beef and more milk on a daily basis – a
combination of management, genetics, and using resources on farm.”
As it stands, many food companies aren’t making demands
on suppliers in terms of sustainability but as Padraig points out, it’s about
Irish producers getting in before the rest of the posse. “We are putting
structures in place so rather than waiting for when it happens and being forced
into certain things, we’re being proactive in this area and creating that point
of differentiation.”
But how important is sustainability to our European
customers of Irish food? Marine Digabel, a journalist with Agra Alimentation in Paris came to Ireland this month with a group
of European food industry writers, visiting Richard Hogge’s farm and the
Glanbia plant in Ballyraggart. “In France there is a real interest in sustainability
but after the French election, local food and French jobs have become more
important.”
With financial woes being felt among France’s retailers
and consumers, several things are happening in their grocery market. Apart from
poultry, meat consumption is decreasing overall but organic meat is growing its
share. Sustainability may have been overtaken by local, but as it makes sense
to bottom line, it’s a strategy not being ignored among large French companies
like Danone.
“Definitely they are all working towards less energy,
less carbon, less waste” says Digabel “probably not because they’re deeply
interested in environment but its more about reducing costs all along the
chain.” Does getting on the sustainability train early create advantage for
Irish producers? “I don’t know if the
Origin Green programme in Ireland will make people switch from one supplier to
another. But it might make them more tempted to change. Definitely simply the
fact that it’s measured – that companies know they’re working with people who
have quality assurance and traceability and tracking the environment, is good
for a long term perspective.”
Padraig O’Donnell agrees. Auditing sustainability is
about creating solutions for customers of Irish food who may not be ready now,
but will need assurances on sustainability in the longer term. “We explain to
buyers what the programme is and what it’s trying to achieve. As we get more
food and drink manufacturers on board we want to show commitment from a 3-5
year plan and also roll out advice at farm level. We want the companies who are
supplying them with product to show the targets they have achieved. A lot of
these customers have set out targets to reduce energy, waste targets here and
they want their suppliers to help them meet those targets.”
Whatever way the food market moves, Ireland is better off
one step ahead than one step behind. We mightn’t have valued it twenty years
ago but the homogeneity of our production systems is something other countries
have now bypassed, making branding themselves sustainable more difficult. “It’s
definitely quite easy for Ireland to set up a programme like this as you have
extensive grazing” says Marine Digabel. In northern France it’s similar to
Ireland but in some places we have intensive production so there is huge
disparity. The same scheme in France would be difficult to implement as you are
saying “this type of production is better than another”.
“For me the material payback is in lowering costs” says
Richard Hogge. “It’s no good to me unless I can improve profitability, the farm
I’m running is a business not a charity. For scheme for me has pointed out
where money can be saved without affecting the environment. It’s like bringing
the euros and the farm along together.”
News has emerged today that Cootehill Farms, also known as Co-Operative Poultry Products Ltd in Cavan is to close with the loss of 90 jobs. It comes at a time when chicken producers and processors are under incredible pressure to deal with the spiraling cost of animal feed which is making business for some, unsustainable.
I talked to Dublin restaurateur Joe Macken (Crack Bird, Jo Burger, Skinflint) about this recently. He still buys chicken from the Republic for his string of eateries as he feels strongly that if we don't, we'll have no Irish chicken supply left and only ourselves to blame. He is also having to pay a lot more for his Irish chicken as the processors ask their customers to take the brunt of the hikes they're having to pay farmers to keep business sustainable. And what's the root of that? Drought in the US, Ukraine bans on wheat exports and spiraling costs in compound feed ingredients that are completely beyond Ireland's control.
