But in March, Ontario’s farmers’ markets were closed to slow the spread of COVID-19. With traditional outlets shut down, farmers had to adapt, and quickly. Instead of passing bags across crowded stalls and trading stories with customers, they went online, boxing orders and delivering them by truck to homes at an accelerated pace, conducting what’s typically a hands-on business with the addition of gloves, masks and six feet of distance.

This shift to e-commerce has created new pressure, and a renewed focus, on regional food systems. In April, markets in many provinces began to reopen but with new safety protocols in place that limit how and when people shop. On April 24, in a move that underscored the importance of direct sales channels, the Ontario government said it would invest $2.5 million to help food producers and farmers’ markets make the transition to e-commerce.

For some farmers, it’s meant rushing to get inventory online and sales started overnight, highlighting the precariousness created by the closure of markets and restaurants. A third of the 500 vendors in the Greenbelt Markets network, which supports Ontario farmers, also supply to restaurants and wholesale businesses. Quebec’s farmers’ union says the sector has seen more than 30% of its market disappear with the closure of hotels, restaurants and institutions. Online sales can mean the difference between survival and unemployment.

The pandemic is also turning what was a burgeoning trend for the farm-to-table movement, home delivery, into an essential part of food sales. Services that were requested infrequently before March are now commonplace. Sarah Bakker of Field Sparrow Farms in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, used to receive a few orders a month for home delivery. Right now, it’s 40 a week.

“We were already thinking of 2020 as the year of home delivery,” said Simon Huntley, who runs Harvie, a Pittsburgh-based technology platform that helps farmers sell directly to customers. But he didn’t anticipate how quickly the pandemic would alter demand. One hundred and eighty farms in the U.S. and Canada are currently using Harvie, and most have seen their sales increase by 200%. “It’s accelerated in two weeks what was going to happen in 10 years,” Huntley said.

Farmers have had to turn to neighbours and local partners when the inventory they planned for a regular week sells out. “You can’t just magically make more stuff appear,” said Cooper. She increased orders from other sources to fulfill her sales, which doubled this season. But, she said, “It’s not easy being a small farm and then having to rely on other small farms.”

“[The pandemic] accelerated in two weeks what was going to happen [on farms] in 10 years.”
—Simon Huntley, Harvie

Platforms like Harvie, Local Line and Open Food Network offer product features specific to farmers’ needs, like virtual markets for multiple farms and customizable orders. These will be essential as the demand for local food increases.

Stress on supply chains caused by the pandemic created long waits for home delivery by large retailers. Going to grocery stores has become more fraught. And while new containment measures for food delivery, such as low-contact and drive-through pick-up, require physical distancing, people still want proximity to the source of their food: to know where it comes from, that it’s reliable, and to support local businesses.

And with restaurants closed, buying farm-direct produce is also a way to eat well at home. Farmers are reaching new customers as a result. “I knew this was big when my ex-mother-in-law texted me to ask where to get home-delivered food,” said Huntley.

Orit Sarfaty, the chief program officer at Evergreen, a national organization focused on the health of urban environments, agreed. In March, her team signed up 10 farmers in 24 hours to fill 150 boxes with fresh produce for Evergreen’s Farm in a Box program. Now, she said, “I’m getting messages from people who’d never been to our farmers’ market. This was the first time they’d experienced fresh produce from a farm.” Evergreen’s boxes were sold out through May.

The loss of markets comes at a critical time for the agricultural sector. About 55,000 temporary foreign workers travel to Canada each year to work on large farms during the peak growing season. Most of them work in Quebec and Ontario.

Because of the pandemic, fewer workers are expected to arrive. When they do, they have to undergo a two-week quarantine period. In April, the federal government said it would provide $1,500 per person to offset the cost of housing and feeding workers during isolation, but that hasn’t prevented a number of deadly COVID-19 outbreaks on southwestern Ontario farms. About 350 workers in the Windsor-Essex region have tested positive and two have died.

As people continue to shelter in place, it’s not clear what business will look like in the long-term. Many farmers hope the current demand is a sign that the confluence of agriculture and technology will turn local food into a mainstream habit.

Will that habit last? “That’s the million-dollar question. It’s the conversation I’m having with every single one of my farming friends,” said Bakker. But, she added, “We’re going to keep delivering as long as the demand is there.”

Jordan MacInnis is a writer based in Toronto.

The post Pandemic sprouts “buy local” movement online appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Later, Fortier demurs. “Our goal this year is to produce half a million dollars’ worth of vegetables. There needs to be pressure to produce.”

Fortier is putting that pressure on for good reason. He needs to teach his trainees how to survive – and thrive – on their own. The 41-year-old knows first-hand that farming can be profitable but that it takes years of practice.

Fortier wasn’t raised on a farm; he grew up in a Montreal suburb. But when he finished his environmental studies degree at McGill University, he and his wife and partner, Maude-Hélène Desroches, crisscrossed North America learning how to grow vegetables. They talked to older farmers, many of whom told them it was too expensive to get into farming, the labour and long hours too gruelling. But determined, they went ahead with it anyway.

In 2004, Fortier and Desroches bought a piece of land in Saint-Armand, Quebec, that they could manage alone and worked the 1.5 acre plot with tools that looked like they belonged to the last century: broadforks, rakes and hoes. A decade later, Fortier published a bestselling book about their experiences, The Market Gardener, that was translated into eight languages. Fortier became one of Quebec’s most famous agricultural exports and ushered in a new era in farming.

He positioned market gardens, and farmers’ markets, as a solution to the ills of agribusiness, a valid career, a way to build a local community, and a way to change the world. Over the last decade, inspired and inexperienced urbanites around the world have been flocking to the countryside to try their hands at working small plots using traditional farming methods.

One of those urbanites happened to be the head of a massive investment empire: André Desmarais is the 63-year-old investment titan and philanthropist behind Power Corporation, a Montreal-headquartered conglomerate. Power Corp. has $1.6 trillion in assets under administration, including holdings in Great-West Lifeco, IGM Financial, Adidas, Umicore’s parent company, and a number of sustainable and renewable energy firms. He and his brother, Paul Jr., are the eldest siblings in one of the country’s most powerful families. They just retired from running Power Corp. in December.

So what drew the high-powered billionaire to farm life?

“The impetus was my grandson,” says Desmarais, who’s married to former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s daughter, France. The birth of their grandchild in 2013 and the vision of a fellow philanthropist and friend, the late David Rockefeller, sparked Desmarais’s interest in organic food and agriculture. In 2003, Rockefeller put aside 80 acres that once belonged to his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, to create the Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York. Stone Barns is a working farm and non-profit centre that trains new farmers. Its restaurant, school programs and conferences are designed to engage the public in small-scale agriculture. Desmarais set out to build a similar farm in Canada.

When he approached Fortier to run La Ferme des Quatre-Temps in 2015, Fortier resisted the role, at least initially. But they both wanted to show how small-scale, low-tech farms could be profitable. Fortier made six figures on less than two acres at his farm in Saint-Armand, Les Jardins de la Grelinette, without, as he wrote in The Market Gardener, “being embedded in the globalized economy.”

Teaming up with Desmarais meant amplifying that message with a billionaire’s backing.

The globally renowned investor seeded several million dollars to set up La Ferme des Quatre-Temps, a social enterprise paving the way toward “a more ecological and nourishing food system,” according to its website. Quatre-Temps relies on local everything, uses few fossil fuels, sells directly to customers interested in supporting the farm-to-table model and trains budding farmers from countries such as Italy and New Zealand.

Desmarais’s initial goal, as he told Bloomberg in 2018, was to demonstrate to young people that having a healthy farm could be profitable and pull in $100,000 in revenue each year.

In 2018, Quatres-Temps sold $700,000 worth of vegetables from eight acres, up 40% from the year before. Its produce, pastured meat and eggs are now in 27 high-profile Montreal restaurants, as well as several farmers’ markets. But, Desmarais admits, “Our farm does not make my estimated $75,000 profit at this stage. It is a more modest $50,000 pre-tax profit.”

He explains, “I have more workers than necessary. We [want] to train as many people as possible.” Research and development, he adds, are key to this farm.

“We try many new methodologies and ideas. A normal farmer cannot do this.”
Desmarais and Fortier are now using technology to grow their impact via a virtual master class, which 1,200 people have taken to date. Desmarais calls it a “multiplier effect we did not previously appreciate or anticipate.”

How farmers work their land has never been more important. As the climate crisis escalates, the connection between soil health and the resilience of food systems has become clearer. Agriculture and forestry contribute to a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and to 10% of Canada’s emissions. Conventional agriculture, defined by the use of chemical fertilizers, monoculture planting and heavy machinery, puts too much carbon in the atmosphere and not enough in the soil.

But farms can also be part of the solution, mitigating climate change by storing carbon in healthy soils. In regenerative agriculture, like the kind practised at Fortier’s farms, farmers avoid tilling to prevent soil erosion, use cover crops and tarps to protect soil or kill unwanted plant life, and plant diverse crops to make the soil more productive. These practices increase the organic matter in soil, which can lead to higher yields and reduced carbon emissions.

Not that Desmarais or Fortier are positioning their farm venture as a silver bullet for the climate crisis. “Remember, our farms are small in land mass and very efficient,” says Desmarais. But those two attributes can also help make farms more adaptive to a changing climate.

Experts say that the ideal scenario, especially in a country as geographically diverse as Canada, is a range of farming practices. “We should be maximizing support to regionally adaptive approaches,” says Stéphane McLachlan, a professor of environmental science at the University of Manitoba. But regenerative agriculture can have a big effect on a large scale. The evidence is so convincing that General Mills, one of the world’s largest packaged food companies, says it will convert one million acres of farmland in the U.S. and Canada to regenerative practices by 2030.

Some provinces are embracing ecological agriculture more rapidly than others. Quebec has the largest number of certified organic producers in the country, and it added hundreds more between 2017 and 2018, according to the Canada Organic Trade Association.

Quebec is also a leader when it comes to support for aspiring farmers. Conventional farms are expensive to own and run, which makes it challenging for young farmers to get into farming and harder for older farmers to find successors. According to Fortier, provincial grants have helped young people start more small-scale farms and have created a more sustainable farming culture. “Farms [here] are well funded,” he says, “and service, training and expertise are passed on.”

The next generation, including Natalie Childs, who co-owns Agricola Cooperative Farm in Papineauville, Quebec, and who trained under Fortier, is using that low-tech expertise to support big goals. “I wanted to do something concrete that helped to build the world I wanted to see,” Childs says. “People want to eat good food that allows them to be a part of the solution.”

Is Quatres-Temps a window into the future of the Desmarais investment empire and a bellwether move for the future of farming in Canada? Desmarais would likely tell you he’s not in this for his own financial gain. But through this tiny eight-acre farming venture, he’s determined to prove that sustainable farming can be a money-maker – if not for global holding companies, then for growers and the communities they serve.

“Regional economies are having economic difficulties because of lack of opportunities,” says Desmarais. “The art of farming in a green way is being lost. We must keep the knowledge alive, and we must push it to develop itself so that it becomes even more efficient and profitable for the farmer.”

Jordan MacInnis is a writer based in Toronto.

The post The farmer and the philanthropist appeared first on Corporate Knights.

What’s a brand to do? Think about clothes differently, for one. Enter the circular economy—a concept that puts systems, instead of trends, at its centre. WEAR’s keynote speaker, Francesca Brkic, oversees the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative and part of her job is to show how a self-sustaining economy can generate growth and value while curbing greenhouse gas emissions and waste.

According to Brkic, the garment sector’s current take-make-waste model is deeply flawed. “Planned obsolescence informs most economic models,” she said at WEAR, “but it’s not compatible with finite resources.” 97% of clothes are made with virgin materials, including cotton and fossil fuel-derived synthetics, but at the end of their use 73% of those materials are either sent to landfills or incinerated.

Brkic and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation want to transform what that end of life looks like for a typical garment. Their solution is less about simply recycling and more about a design mindset that keeps durable products in use for longer. This summer the foundation launched a program to encourage millions of designers around the globe to “design out waste and pollution.” The foundation partnered with Gap Inc., H&M, Tommy Hilfiger and others to rethink the world’s most popular pant. Its Jeans Redesign initiative now helps retailers produce more durable, recyclable and traceable  jeans. Case in point: Dutch company MUD Jeans’ Lease a Jeans program lets customers rent jeans (which happen to be made of high recycled and organic content) and then return them to be repaired, resold or recycled.

The industry’s newest and brightest ideas are putting circularity into practice. Rental, resale and refurbishment sites, like U.S.-based The RealReal and Rent the Runway or Reheart and Fitzroy in Canada, are part of the fastest growing categories in fashion. Even H&M is piloting a clothing rental service. Footwear giant Adidas just created the first mono material running shoe (due in stores in 2021) that’s 100% recyclable and made entirely of ocean plastic. Unlike Nike’s old shoe recycling program which turned used runners into basketball courts, Adidas’ design means old sneakers will be remade into new pairs in a closed loop when a customer is done with them.

In a breakout session on circular fashion, WEAR attendees put this kind of lifecycle thinking into practice. How could a product’s life be extended? How might it better serve a user’s needs? Asher Lichtman, who develops packaging for retailers at The Unique Group, said that the interest in sustainable systems has grown but that cost, and corporate will, are still impediments. “Sustainability comes up in every discussion we have. Is the system fixable? Of course. But are the major brands going to buy into the notion? And will they do their part to make sure it’s adhered to?”

Making sure brands adhere to waste-averting models is something more governments are looking into. In October, the EU Council requested a formal framework to move certain sectors, including textiles, to a circular economy. There’s no regulated producer responsibility for dealing with textile waste in Canada yet, but Kelly Drennan, executive director of Fashion Takes Action (the nonprofit organization behind WEAR) says they’re working on it via the Ontario Textile Diversion Collaborative.  Update: Drennan has been appointed taskforce chair to develop a circular fashion standard for Canada through the CSA Group (formerly Canadian Standards Association). 

To Brkic, fixing the system means creating products that benefit all stakeholders, not just end users. “You can’t safeguard the environment without safeguarding people,” she said, “they work hand in hand.” Improving the way a t-shirt is made also means improving the system in which it was created.

The industry’s reach, and its effects, are now too big to ignore. There are 80 billion new clothing items produced each year. They contribute an outsize amount to the climate and waste crisis. Clothes need not just one but multiple lives, with little or no impact at scale. The brands that give consumers that option will lead the way into 2020 and beyond.

The post Fashion industry fighting waste with circular economy trend appeared first on Corporate Knights.

His new goal?

Helping companies build a better chocolate bar.

Global cocoa demand is on the rise and its market value is expected to double by 2025 compared to 2015 levels. Over half of the world’s supply comes from West African countries like Ivory Coast and Ghana, where cocoa isn’t just one of the hardest supply chains to monitor and track, it’s also one of the most destructive.

For as long as there’s been chocolate bars, the cocoa supply chain has been rife with illegal deforestation, human rights violations and child labour. Just last month, The Washington Post reported that two decades after candy makers like Mars, Nestlé and Hershey pledged to stop using cocoa harvested by children, it’s still likely that a chocolate bar purchased in the United States was the product of child labour.

Major cocoa companies use a few different methods to find out how the beans they put on store shelves were grown, picked, traded and processed. Audits and monitoring are one approach. Certification is another. Still another is legislation.

So far, the system isn’t working.

One reason is size. There are 4 to 6 million smallholder cocoa farms around the world. Three of the largest brands, Mondelez, Mars and Nestlé, have a chain of nearly half a million farms. They usually have a direct relationship with over half of the suppliers that source and sell beans from those farms. This leaves millions of suppliers with whom they have no direct relationship, which is where problems arise.

“Cocoa can’t be sustainable unless it’s traceable,” says Juliette Barre of Sourcemap.

Implementing Sourcemap’s app in the field in Ghana

Another is the paper trail. Low tech commodities like cocoa beans exist in a low tech chain. Transactions are tracked on paper and transported on bicycles and trucks, leaving room for social and environmental corruption that isn’t recorded or subject to regulation. Often there’s no digital tracking or paper trail to verify that payroll was made, or taxes paid, or to ensure that the cocoa being sold by one farm wasn’t smuggled in from another.

Bonanni wanted to build a platform to address these challenges directly. But timing was key. In the last few years, Android phones have become better and cheaper. Mobile phone use in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing faster than in any other part of the world. This laid the groundwork for increased traceability even in parts of the continent where electricity can be sparse, and at the end of last year, Sourcemap launched its Responsible Cocoa Platform.

Today, if a farmer has a smartphone, the platform can trace the cocoa he or she produces down to the size, shape and location of the farm as well as its yields, income and workforce.

Suppliers are registered with an online network (the first of its kind), data is captured and scores on sustainability, social compliance, risk and performance are calculated using web or mobile apps. Everything gets stored in the cloud.

Sourcemap’s app used to outline farms in West Africa

Mapping beans—and communities—can mean addressing the system’s inherent inequality. Knowing whether or not a farmer has enough electricity to turn on the lights, confirming the farm’s proximity to drinking water and useable roads and understanding the availability of health care, schools and access to credit is critical.

“That constellation of support,” says Bonanni, “is what powers a sustainable supply chain.”

Technology has a large role to play: in the search for a solution to cocoa’s ills, political will has often come up short. Agreements meant to reduce child labour, like the Harkin-Engel Protocol from 2001, floundered when the chocolate industry failed to meet its goals. Etelle Higonnet of Mighty Earth, a D.C.-based non-profit that works on environmental protection, says that a recent agreement designed to address deforestation, the World Cocoa Foundation’s Cocoa & Forests Initiative, is important—its 34 company signatories account for 85% of the world’s cocoa use—but still needs to deliver real monitoring and traceability.

While certification accounts for a small portion of the market, approximately 20%, it’s received a large amount of attention. In the last three years, two companies, Cadbury (a subsidiary of Mondelez) and Mars, distanced themselves from the Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance certification standards they had committed to a decade ago and replaced them with their own programs, a move many consider problematic because of a lack of third-party oversight and international consistency.

While Mars had committed to selling 100% certified sustainable beans by 2020 and 50% of its beans were already certified by 2018, that year the company’s global VP of cocoa told Reuters that “certification isn’t enough.” Said John Ament, “Our belief is that we need to set more demanding standards than certification sets today.”

Ament isn’t alone in his critique of certifications. Mighty Earth’s Higonnet says that certification bodies such as Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance need to commit to a higher price floor to address extreme poverty and implement more rigorous monitoring and intervention at every stage of production.

All of which makes traceability and transparency pivotal. To Higonnet this means “you know where your cocoa comes from, so you can discover all the problems in the chain, then start fixing them.”

Bonanni agrees. “There’s no excuse for a chain not to be traceable.”

On the platform today, 250,000 cocoa farms are mapped and traceable and thousands are being added each month for clients like Hershey and Mars. Sourcemap is working on a 100% traceable supply chain, including non-certified cocoa, by 2025—the first time non-certified cocoa has been mapped at scale and an important first step.

The post Fixing chocolate’s troubled supply chain appeared first on Corporate Knights.