“There’s no longer any question that this works,” says Ivey Business School professor Joshua Pearce, who is also the founder of the not-for-profit Agrivoltaics Canada. The portmanteau reflects the desire to unite two constituencies – farmers and solar panel companies – whose interests often pit them against one another.

Farming sunshine is like farming wheat, corn or barley: it’s easiest on flat expanses of treeless land with easy access to roads and infrastructure. For this reason, solar developers eyeing farmland have met with resistance. Ontario, for example, passed legislation in 2024 prohibiting prime agricultural tracts from being planted over with solar panels.

Agrivoltaics, however, is moving past proof-of-concept and into established practice. In 2024, Global Market Insights valued the industry worldwide at US$6.3 billion, with a growth forecast of 5.8% over the next eight years. Although solar power remains a small proportion of the world’s electricity production (just 4% globally, and about 5% in the United States), agrivoltaic farms now account for about 1% of the solar power generated in the country.

The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory lists 599 agrivoltaic sites totalling 65,756 acres from coast to coast, generating a total of 10,473 megawatts of energy (enough to power two million households). For context, grazing land takes up about 659 million acres in the United States. Studies suggest that devoting even 1% of current farmland to agrivoltaics could provide 20% of the energy needs of the United States.

Big energy companies are getting into the game. Oak Run, a giant 6,000-acre project of which 2,000 will be agrivoltaic (and rising to 4,000 within eight years), was recently approved for development in Ohio’s Madison County and is one of the first to try agrivoltaics at utility scale. The developer, Savion, is a subsidiary of Shell. One of the company’s neighbouring projects, Madison Fields Solar Project, has been operational since 2023, and Amazon buys all 180 megawatts the farm produces.

Both Madison Fields and Oak Run will graze sheep, and Oak Run will also grow hay. Livestock and crops cohabiting with solar panels require less water, because of the shade and moisture retention the arrays provide.

While agrivoltaics have been shown to be cost effective and scaleable for sheep grazing and beekeeping, researchers have also been experimenting with every other crop under the sun. A key finding is that crop yields or quality can go up when photovoltaic arrays are used as companion “planting.”

Promising results in wine country have emerged with La Svolta, a vintner in Italy’s Puglia region producing both primitivo, a red grape characteristic of southern Italy, and goldtraminer, a white grape usually only viable in cooler mountainside regions. Grapes are prone to sunburn; the shade of solar panels protects the delicate fruits from damage, and, depending how much sun exposure is desirable, an array can be tilted at different angles like the bill of a baseball cap.

La Svolta’s wine has even been reported to taste better. In 2024, the Puglia region experienced scorching temperatures, and the solar panels slowed ripening and produced grapes with a more balanced sugar content compared with those from nearby vineyards that were fully exposed to the beating sun.

While it can still be more profitable for farmers to simply lease their land to solar developers, not all farmers are sanguine about the possible effects on soil, or the hazardous waste cleanup that may mark the end of the lease.

“What message do you have for another farmer who might be considering leasing their land in this situation?” a reporter from the Ohio newspaper The Columbus Dispatch asked in a video taken with a farmer who had gone into business with a solar company. “Don’t do it,” Tom Ebenhack responded. “The money is not bad at all, but what’s going to happen to the land? I seriously worry that it’ll never be the same.”

One of the promises of agrivoltaics is guarding against the loss of soil quality on solar farms. Solar alone sometimes means stripping topsoil, but combining solar with crops can maintain and even enhance the presence of elements like nitrogen, crucial for microbial health. China is the global leader in solar, and the Junma Solar Power Station in the Kubuqi Desert (winner of the 2019 Guinness World Record for largest solar panel installation in the shape of a horse) seems to be having an anti-desertification effect. By reducing evaporation and slowing ground winds, solar arrays can protect vegetation or restore it to vulnerable soil.

And in a warming climate, we will need all the help we can get in protecting soil and food systems from heat exhaustion. “This is kind of a long-term food-security issue,” Pearce says. “Not just energy. It’s actually more about food and agriculture.”

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Since the 1940s, diseases like these have been kept in check thanks to drugs like penicillin and streptomycin that drove death rates among both animals and humans – especially children under five – way down. Bacteria, however, haven’t survived for 3.5 billion years without developing defence mechanisms against environmental insults, and this includes modern pharmaceuticals. Called antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, this survival tactic has created a crisis that experts say is as urgent as climate change.

“Antimicrobial resistance is at levels that we’ve never seen in developed countries,” Barkema says. “There will come a time when a wound cannot be treated anymore if it is infected.”

AMR is getting worse in part because of animal antibiotic consumption. The statistics are grim. An estimated 104,079 tonnes of antibiotics will be used by the agriculture sector by 2030 as the demand for pork, beef and poultry grows, especially in low- and middle-income countries. A 2023 article in The Lancet connected animal antibiotic consumption with resistance in human diseases: in 2017, AMR was implicated in the deaths of 1.27 million people. AMR is expected to cause 10 million deaths by 2050, making it more dangerous than cancer.

The ever-increasing industrialization of agriculture is one of the drivers. The United States has mega hog facilities that each produce hundreds of thousands of animals every year. In Canada, 7,000 hog operations produce about 25.5 million animals every year. And China, which began large-scale swine and dairy production about four decades ago, has built a 26-storey pig high-rise that researchers say will be a conduit for disease due to crowding, which, among many things, causes stress that decreases natural immunity.

Chinese farmers didn’t have the husbandry skills or experience to optimize herd health, says Barkema, a dairy cow specialist and infectious diseases expert who has made numerous trips to China, advising dairy farmers on their operations. “A blanket of antibiotics” was used to “cover mistakes in management,” he says. “The best way to prevent antimicrobial resistance is by prevention of infections, because then you don’t have to treat them – period.” Nevertheless, China remains the world’s largest consumer of agriculture antibiotics, using 30% of overall antimicrobial production for livestock maintenance, according to the journal Current Research in Microbial Sciences.

Western nations, too, have been guilty of antimicrobial overuse since the 1940s, when it was discovered that low-dose antibiotics not only prevented disease but caused animals to gain weight. Administering constant low doses killed off weak bacteria but inadvertently selected for stronger ones, increasing AMR. Legislation in the United Kingdom, the EU and North America has banned the use of antibiotics for such use; however, such restrictions are less diligently maintained in lower- to middle-income countries, Barkema says.

Once bacteria develop resistance, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. The B.C. Centre for Disease Control encourages the reduction of antibiotics in humans to try to tackle AMR. Animal husbandry practices, however, counteract the measures increasingly being taken by human medicine practitioners, with antibiotic use in animal farming growing by an estimated 8% between 2020 and 2030, according to Nature.

The ability to leap the species barrier makes the spectre of AMR increasingly grim, and more research is needed to assess how easily resistant bacteria pass from animals into humans.

The Government of Canada reports that 14,000 deaths were linked to AMR in 2018, while AMR was directly responsible for 5,400 deaths. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 2.8 million infections and more than 35,000 deaths in humans related to AMR.

There will come a time when a wound cannot be treated anymore if it is infected.

 

– Herman Barkema, infectious diseases expert

 

Tackling AMR requires what has been dubbed a “One Health” approach that involves coordination between animal health, human health and environmental experts. In Alberta, where Barkema is based, more than 100 researchers from different disciplines – human and veterinary medicine as well as the Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas – are working on antimicrobial stewardship. The public is “very much involved,” with regular informational workshops on what individuals can do to fight AMR. “We need to make the public aware of this silent epidemic,” Barkema says.

The One Health approach is growing globally. In June, four multilateral agencies – the World Health Organization, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environment Programme and the World Organisation for Animal Health – released A One Health Priority Research Agenda for Antimicrobial Resistance to advocate for increased research and investment.

The same month, the Public Health Agency of Canada released the five-year Pan-Canadian Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance. It was developed with federal partners, the provinces and territories to strengthen the country’s collective AMR response using the One Health approach.

Critical to combatting AMR is improved diagnostics, says Ian Lewis, a visiting fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. Last year, Lewis developed a new technology that would allow a laboratory to identify in less than 20 hours the specific bacterium causing a blood infection and the types of antibiotics it will respond to. The short diagnostic timeline is a vast improvement over the two- to four-day period required in the past to identify the strain of bacteria causing sepsis, which causes one in 18 deaths in Canada. During this wait, medical staff had to guess which antibiotics to use – sometimes selecting the incorrect one – then switch to the right drug once the offending bacterium was identified. “When the guesses are wrong, patients are at a dramatically higher risk for death or serious complications,” Lewis says. “The main issue is that the chance of dying goes up by 7% per hour when patients are receiving the wrong medication.”

Being forced to guess treatment also exacerbates resistance. “The widespread use of antibiotics in hospitals and in the community is a central problem that is contributing to AMR,” says Lewis, speaking from the 2023 ASM/ESCMID Joint Conference on Drug Development to Meet the Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance, held in late September in Boston. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about half of all prescribed antibiotics have zero medical benefit. This is “directly attributable to a lack of rapid diagnostic tools,” Lewis says, adding that improved diagnostics should be used in veterinarian laboratories as well as human labs.

Lewis says that the implications of AMR are so dire that “it will eclipse climate change as a primary concern. People will start dying from common infections that are imminently treatable now.” AMR doesn’t present simply infection risks; it also means that people will have to eschew elective surgery or certain types of chemotherapy that cannot be undertaken without antibiotics as the risks of getting an incurable infection could outweigh the potential benefits of therapies. “Antibiotics are the foundation of modern medicine; if we don’t do something about the emerging burden of antimicrobial resistance, Canadian life expectancy could be 20 years shorter,” Lewis says.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based magazine writer, documentary filmmaker and author, specializing in gender, conservation and environmental stories. 

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The average baby will go through more than 5,000 disposable diapers – 92% of which end up in landfills. But NappiCycle is finding new uses for soiled nappies. The Welsh company turns used diapers into carbon fibres that bind with asphalt to create roads twice as durable as conventional surfaces. Rob Poyer, a director of NappiCycle, gives the government much of the credit: “The Welsh government setting such high recycling targets has produced some amazing innovation,” and £180,000 in funding helped transform 100,000 diapers into a 2.2-kilometre stretch of road.

Norway dreams of electric gold

Having won the most medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Norway is now vying for another record: the first country to make the shift to fully electric vehicles. In 2021, 65% of new cars sold in Norway were EVs, up from 50% the year before. Only 8% of new vehicles ran only on gasoline or diesel; the rest were hybrids. Why is oil-producing Norway all-in on electric? The Norwegian EV Association cites the country’s high gasoline prices, the elimination of sales taxes and toll fees for EVs, and raising taxes on conventional cars as reasons EVs have taken off.

Coming to a table near you: Meat made from air

“Making meat doesn’t have to mean deforestation, factory farming, or greenhouse gases harming our planet,” claims California start-up Air Protein. The company has raised more than US$30 million to develop what it calls the first “carbon-negative, earth-positive protein source.” The recipe: mix high-protein bacteria in a fermentation tank with carbon dioxide, oxygen, water and minerals. Within hours, you have a protein-rich flour with twice the amino acids of soybeans. Air Protein is targeting various products but will enter the market with faux chicken. Where’d they get the idea? The process was first proposed by NASA in the 1970s to feed astronauts.

Ammonia awaits its moment in the sun (or wind)

You know ammonia as a household cleaning product – but the pungent compound of nitrogen and hydrogen is also a fertilizer, a solvent and an ingredient in food and medicine. Now scientists are studying “green ammonia” – produced using low-carbon energy – as a versatile fuel for power plants and motor vehicles. With wind and solar costs tumbling, green ammonia could find a role on farms as a fertilizer, an affordable fuel and an energy-storage medium more efficient than batteries. “For deep decarbonization of agriculture, you switch to green ammonia,” says University of Minnesota energy researcher Michael Reese, who’s running a demonstration project in Minnesota.

Solar will power Glasgow Airport’s net-zero pledge

How do you make air travel more sustainable? Glasgow Airport, the U.K.’s ninth-busiest airport by passenger volume, has just broken ground for a 30-acre, 15-megawatt solar farm that should go into operation next year. The airport already buys its electricity from 100% renewable sources, but building its own generating capacity will enable it to control its future as it replaces its service fleet with electric vehicles and overhauls its parking areas with charging stations. Glasgow Airport will also sell energy to its neighbours. While the airport hasn’t yet said how it plans to tackle Scope 3 emissions (those of planes landing and taking off in Glasgow’s airspace), it does hope to be a testbed for hydrogen and electric flights.

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In Canada, the agricultural sector accounted for roughly 10% of our greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. These emissions have steadily increased since 1990 thanks to yield-boosting petrochemical fertilizers and livestock farming – emissions that will need to come down fast if the sector is going to do its fair share in helping Canada meet its climate targets, said Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights, at part five of our Earth Index series tackling the “say–do” gap in Canada’s high-emitting industries. 

But in the last year, the rate of emissions reductions in Canada’s agricultural sector was a mere 14% of what it needs to be to hit our 2030 targets. 

“We have little to show in terms of emissions reduction progress from this sector, which leaves a large ‘say–do’ gap,” Torrie told the panel February 2.

Carbon sink

In recent years, the National Farmers Union has been taking a fine-grain look at where Canada’s agriculture emissions are coming from. For the last century, we’ve done something unprecedented: “We’ve created a very high-input, high-emission food system,” said Darrin Qualman, the director of climate crisis policy and action at National Farmers Union (Canada). Qualman said government policies have only made matters worse: “In Canada, the core directive is to maximize exports. This leads to a production maximization policy and, unfortunately, an input maximization policy, and the unintended consequence is we’re also maximizing the emissions coming out.”

There are signs that’s beginning to shift. Last year, the federal government said it would spend $200 million over two years to help farmers keep more carbon in the ground. Part of these funds will go towards helping farmers reduce the amount of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers they use. Nitrogen fertilizers emit nitrous oxide – a potent greenhouse gas that is 300 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. The government has also said it would pay farmers to grow cover crops (which are grown between seasons to improve soil health) and use rotational grazing practices.

We have little to show in terms of emissions reduction progress from this sector, which leaves a large ‘say–do’ gap.

–Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights

While “regenerative agriculture” is a buzzword being adopted by politicians and food companies, the ideas behind them are deeply rooted in Indigenous farming methods that go back generations. Terrylynn Brant, the founder of Mohawk Seedkeeper Gardens, told the panel that Indigenous people, who have farmed sustainably for millennia, often don’t get credit for having invented these practices.

Brant, who is a seedkeeper, said her community in Ohsweken, Ontario, plants crops like corn with just a stick with no need for tilling, and uses companion planting – growing crops together that are mutually beneficial – to limit pests. Her community eats seasonally, thinks of food as “life’s sustainer,” and considers its agriculture “Earth healing.”

“If you’re destroying the Earth, you’re not a farmer as far as our people are concerned,” she said. “You’re a killer.”

Mouths to feed

Some have questioned whether regenerative agriculture can be scaled to the level needed to feed the world’s growing population and claim that input-intensive industrial farming is necessary to make sure people don’t starve. But Gillian Flies, an organic vegetable farmer from Creemore, Ontario, and the president of Canadian Organic Growers, told panellists such arguments are a scare tactic by conventional agriculture. “It’s currently not working,” she said of today’s food landscape. 

Flies, who also co-founded the Farmers for Climate Solutions coalition, said that there is plenty of food but that a lot of it is processed (making poor use of higher-yield products, as Qualman noted), and that regenerative practices can bring old farmland, that has been desertified by industrial agriculture, back into production. 

While regenerative agriculture has attracted a lot of attention for its potential to lock carbon into the soil, the science on just how much carbon it can sequester in the ground is unsettled. Nature’s Path Foods has been piloting the use of Regenerative Organic Certified ingredients in some of its products, though the company’s organic program manager, Dag Falck, told the panel the benefits last only as long as farmers maintain the practices that support the very microbial organisms in soil that draw down carbon. “When we talk about locking carbon in the soil, we’re not locking into the soil forever – only as long as there are healthy organisms in the soil.” 

If you’re destroying the Earth, you’re not a farmer as far as our people are concerned. You’re a killer.

-Terrylynn Brant, founder of Mohawk Seedkeeper Gardens

Data is now coming in to support the shift to low-carbon agriculture, said Gary Csöff, a senior digital agribusiness consultant with IBM. “Data is kind of the new commodity on a lot of farms,” he told the panel. But he said that while momentum is building in support of climate action on farms, there is no silver bullet. “It’s not going to be ‘let’s turn a light switch on’ and all of a sudden we lose a bunch of emissions.”

One key way Canada can bring down emissions in the sector is by moving away from greenhouse-gas intensive livestock agriculture. Innovative cell-based cultured proteins and plant-based alternatives will be central to that effort. Adam Noble, the CEO of biotech start-up Noblegen, is making proteins using a microorganism called Euglena gracilis. “With the world primarily relying on animal sources as our protein source … we can’t afford to do that at the scale we’re going at,” he said. 

Scaling up solutions will require greater government support, noted Flies, pointing out that on a per acre basis Canada invests 73 times less than the EU and 13 times less than the United States on climate-friendly agriculture practices. “We aren’t going to get anywhere quickly without changing policy.”

The post Can we feed a growing planet while cutting agricultural emissions? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

To put these costs in perspective, they are roughly double the total economic value of the global food system.

Feeding eight billion people healthy, sustainable food by 2030 is a monumental challenge. Yet transforming food systems that inflict tens of trillions of dollars in health and environmental damages is essential for realizing human rights.

Industrial food production is a major driver of the planetary environmental emergency. Food systems are responsible for 21 to 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions, 70% of water use and 80% of the pollution causing eutrophication and marine dead zones.

Agriculture and aquaculture are major threats for 85% of the species identified as threatened with extinction. Deforestation – mainly expanding agricultural land to produce beef, soy and palm oil – is responsible for 30% of the infectious diseases that spill over into humans from wildlife and livestock, raising the risk of pandemics.

Environmental problems are exacerbated by food loss and waste, as an estimated 30% of all food produced is never eaten.

Skyrocketing impacts

Driven by increasing wealth, population growth and the rising dominance of input-intensive industrial agriculture, the negative environmental impacts of food systems are skyrocketing. Since 1960, synthetic fertilizer use jumped more than 800%. Meat production leapt more than 500%. Unhealthy diets are estimated to be the world’s most significant risk factor for disease, contributing to more than 10 million premature deaths annually.

Enough food is produced annually to provide adequate nutrition for everyone, but a large portion is fed to livestock, wasted or used to manufacture non-food products such as biofuels.

Two billion people lack adequate access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food, including 700 to 800 million suffering from daily hunger. Paradoxically, more than two billion people are overweight or obese.

Diets in high- and middle-income countries include excessive animal protein and a growing share of ultra-processed, nutrient-poor foods. Unhealthy diets contribute to obesity, diabetes and a smorgasbord of non-communicable diseases.

The environmental impacts and unhealthy diets associated with industrial food systems interfere with the enjoyment of a wide range of human rights, including the rights to life, health, water, food, a healthy environment, development, an adequate standard of living, cultural rights, the rights of the child and Indigenous rights.

Rights and obligations

To prevent negative impacts on human rights and the environment, governments should apply a rights-based approach to all food-related laws, regulations, policies and actions. A rights-based approach should focus on the right to food and the right to a healthy environment. This approach would clarify the obligations of governments and the responsibilities of businesses; catalyze ambitious actions; prioritize progress for the poorest, most vulnerable and marginalized communities; and include people in designing and implementing solutions.

Not all food systems contribute equally to environmental degradation and human rights violations. There is a vast diversity of production practices and an even wider range of diets. The use of water, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics and other inputs, as well as associated levels of pollution and environmental damage, varies extensively by type of food and production method. Meat and dairy generally use the most land and have the largest environmental impacts per calorie produced. Agroecology – a holistic approach to food systems that integrates ecological principles with social equity – offers more healthy and sustainable practices.

Experts have called for transformative changes to food systems to achieve just, healthy and sustainable outcomes. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development stated that “the way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse.”

Not an option

The good news is that there are proven solutions available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; enhance carbon sinks; reduce air and water pollution; alleviate water scarcity; decrease the use of pesticides, fertilizers and antibiotics; restore soil health; safeguard biological diversity; and decrease the risks of zoonotic diseases. Many solutions offer multiple benefits – for example, reducing pesticide use is good for soil, biodiversity and human health.

While the foregoing changes are necessary, they are not sufficient. Fulfilling the rights to food and a healthy environment also requires reducing inequalities, promoting healthy and sustainable diets, cutting food loss and waste, and transforming governance to be more participatory, preventive and precautionary.

Economic reforms are also imperative. More than US$600 billion in food-related subsidies that undermine sustainability should be repurposed to support smallholders (farms less than two hectares), agroecology and innovation; implement sustainable production practices; end over-fishing; and restore damaged ecosystems.

Prioritizing the rights to food and a healthy environment offers a clear path toward just and sustainable food systems. It is not an option for governments; it is an obligation.

David R. Boyd is the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and environment, as well as an associate professor of law, policy and sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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“If the company isn’t disclosing that, there’s no way to track if [their climate targets are] just lip service or if they’re actually walking the walk,” says Meryl Richards, the director of food and forests for Ceres. 

Wendy’s, Costco, Loblaw, Beyond Meat (the popular plant-based meat alternative maker) and JBS USA (the world’s largest meat supplier) were a few of the many companies on the list that don’t disclose any Scope 3 emissions. Starbucks, Hershey and Mondelez International were the only ones that fully disclosed their emissions and had adequate emissions targets that included curbing Scope 3 emissions. 

Richards says Ceres has already heard from some of the large companies on the list that failed to completely disclose their Scope 3 emissions, asking to work together. Ceres has also invited investors to become signatories of its Food Emissions 50 initiative, which hopes to push North America’s highest-emitting public food companies to improve their climate risk disclosures. In order to get more transparency, Ceres figures it will need investors to help put pressure on these companies. 

In late August, an enormous group of investors, responsible for US$55 trillion in assets and involved in an initiative called Climate Action 100+, laid out a list of actions they say the food industry must take to reach net-zero. One of their expectations is that food companies will factor the climate implications of their full supply chains into their decision-making.

As food and agriculture contribute an eye-popping quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, it will be vital for investors to get disclosure on this issue to know if companies are really meeting promised targets. “Without it, there is no way to hold them accountable,” says Richards. 

The post Is Big Food hiding the carbon footprint of your lunch? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

From cattle farming to oil palm plantations, industrial agriculture remains the greatest driver of deforestation, particularly in the tropics. And as agricultural activities expand and intensify, ecosystems lose plants, wildlife and other biodiversity.

The permanent transformation of forested landscapes for commodity crops currently drives more than a quarter of all global deforestation. This includes soy, palm oil, beef cattle, coffee, cocoa, sugar and other key ingredients of our increasingly simplified and highly processed diets.

The erosion of the forest frontier has also increased our exposure to infectious diseases, such as Ebola, malaria and other zoonotic diseases. Spillover incidents would be far less prevalent without human encroachment into the forest.

We need to examine our global food system: Is it doing its job, or is it contributing to forest destruction and biodiversity loss — and putting human life at risk?

What are we eating?

The food most associated with biodiversity loss also tends to also be connected to unhealthy diets across the globe. Fifty years after the Green Revolution — the transition to intensive, high yielding food production reliant on a limited number of crop and livestock species — nearly 800 million people still go to bed hungry; one in three is malnourished; and up to two billion people suffer some sort of micronutrient deficiency and associated health impacts, such as stunting or wasting.

The environmental impacts of our agricultural systems are also severe. The agricultural sector is responsible for up to 30 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, excessive water use, the loss of important pollinators and chemical pollution, among other impacts. It is pushing planetary boundaries even further.

In short, modern agriculture is failing to sustain the people and the ecological resources on which they rely. The incidence of infectious diseases correlates with the current loss of biodiversity.

Deforestation and disease

Few viruses have generated more global response than the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the current pandemic. Yet in the past 20 years, humanity has also faced SARS, MERS, H1N1, Chikungunya, Zika and numerous local outbreaks of Ebola. All of them are zoonotic diseases and at least one, Ebola, has been linked to deforestation.

Farming large numbers of genetically similar livestock along the forest frontier may provide a route for pathogens to mutate and become transmissible to humans. Forest loss and landscape change bring humans and wildlife into ever-increasing proximity, heightening the risk of an infectious disease spillover.

An estimated 70 per cent of the global forest estate is now within just one kilometre of a forest edge — a statistic that starkly illustrates the problem. We are destroying that critical buffer that forests provide.

Zoonoses may be more prevalent in simplified systems with lower levels of biodiversity. In contrast, more diverse communities lower the risk of spillover into human populations. This form of natural control is known as the “dilution effect” and illustrates why biodiversity is an important regulatory mechanism.

The pandemic is further heightening pressures on forests. Increased unemployment, poverty and food insecurity in urban areas is forcing internal migration, as people return to their rural homes, particularly in the tropics. This trend will no doubt increase demands on remaining forest resources for fuel wood, timber and further conversion for small-scale agriculture.

Wet markets under scrutiny

The links between zoonoses and wildlife has led to many calls during the current pandemic to ban the harvest and sale of wild meat and other forms of animal source foods. That might be too hasty a reaction: wild meat is an essential resource for millions of rural people, particularly in the absence of alternative animal food sources.

It is, however, not necessarily essential for urban dwellers who do have alternative sources of animal protein to purchase wild meat as a “luxury” item. Urban markets selling wild meat could increase the risk of zoonotic spillover but not all wet markets are the same. There are countless wet markets throughout the world that do not sell wildlife products and such markets are fundamental to the food security and nutrition as well as the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, international agencies, including the Committee on World Food Security, have been concerned about the long-term viability of our current food system: could it provide diverse and nutritious diets while maintaining environmental sustainability and landscape diversity? The current pandemic has highlighted major shortfalls in our environmental stewardship.

We must harness the interconnected nature of our forests and food systems more effectively if we are to avoid future crises. Better integration of forests, agroforests (the incorporation of trees into agricultural systems) at the broader landscape scale, breaking down the institutional, economic, political and spatial separation of forestry and agriculture, can provide the key to a more sustainable, food secure and healthier future.

Terry Sunderland is a professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The west-end Toronto company reclaims a chocolate legacy that might seem un-chocolatey to many — a healthy, spiritual, dark and bitter-tasting food and drink hailing from Mexico Profundo, the ancient Indigenous Mayan culture of Mexico.

ChocoSol is in the business of selling chocolate bars and drinking chocolates, though its business would more accurately be described as a mission to sell goods or services with a social or environmental purpose.

Even by the standards of a “social enterprise,” ChocoSol’s business model seems quirky. Its unbleached packages feature a Mexican Day of the Dead-inspired skull, with bike chains for eyes and teeth. The company’s “ChocoSolistas” also call themselves chocolate “pedallers” and take pride in using bicycles to transport their display tables and power the blenders that make chocolate drinks at farmers’ market stands across the city. The bicycles brand them as supporters of neighbourhood technologies that feature sweat-equity over bank financing.

ChocoSol founder and owner Michael Sacco, who has a side hustle as a PhD student at Trent University in Peterborough, likes to call the company a learning enterprise, because its staff and customers are learning how to produce and live in tune with the environment. But the real learners may well be today’s conventional businesses that can be taught a thing or two about engaging sought-after youthful customers hungry for food choices that smack of authentic and sustainable experiences.

In its latest Flavor & Trend Forecast, marketing agency THP predicts that in 2020 “brands will need to champion a collective appreciation for sustainability, whole ingredients and minimal processing in order to thrive within this emerging consumer narrative.”

ChocoSol has that whole package down pat.

That’s a way of telling informed customers that ChocoSol’s chocolate comes not from monoculture plantations with reputations for using pesticides and child labour, but from diverse gardens planted with vanilla, achiote peppers, coffee, hardwood and fruits alongside cacao trees.

As a Toronto food policy enthusiast and chair of the Coalition for a Green Economy, I toured these forest gardens with Sacco in 2007. Through “horizontal” trade, ChocoSol cuts out the vertical supply chain relied on by most big companies and deals directly with producers, commonly offering them 15 per cent above the going international wholesale price (up to 300 per cent more for some rarer beans). Relying on face-to-face relationships, direct traders reduce the red tape common with fair trade labels that deal with large-volume producers.

But behind its social, ethical and small-scale artisanal production methods, ChocoSol runs as much on hard-edged business forecasts as integrity and soul.

“They’ve got what all their competitors would die for,” says Barry Martin, owner of the communications firm Hypenotic, which handles ChocoSol’s account, as well as that of many others in the “purpose-driven” space of Toronto food-based businesses.

“ChocoSol makes what people need, does it in a way that’s memorable, generates an experience, tells a great story that makes it bigger than life,” Martin says. “Of all my clients, ChocoSol best expresses the whole range that companies need to strive for” to avoid the downward spiral of competing as a commodity for lowest cost.

Sacco, who brands himself an “ecopreneur,” has raised up the company by its bootstraps since 2006, when he launched with a $15,000 line of credit and $15,000 “from the bank of friends and family.” Purchases from these “bankers” and their contacts probably accounted for most of the $20,000 in ChocoSol sales that year.

In 2019, says Sacco, ChocoSol will clear $1.8 million in sales, half to wholesale accounts — despite the fact it retails for twice the price of conventional chocolate.

The company won top prizes at the 2016 and 2017 Canadian National Competition for chocolate-makers and took gold for its Jaguar Pure, and bronze and silver for its Jaguar Swirl and Crunch, in this year’s International Chocolate Awards.

Jaguar is a ChocoSol standout specialty, inspired by a woman elder from San Pablo Etla, just outside the city of Oaxaca. She took Sacco under her wing when he was a graduate student doing action research on Indigenous food traditions in Oaxaca, the unofficial capital of Mayan corn, cacao and grasshopper-based cuisine.

Struck by Jaguar’s commercial potential to support forest-based peasant-style agriculture in village communities in the Oaxaca region, Sacco developed “direct trade” relationships with small family farmers who sold him chocolate, coffee and vanilla from their communal forest gardens. To support a premium niche market around Jaguar, Sacco and community groups planted more than 50,000 trees yielding the Jaguar species of cacao around tiny villages such as Felipe de Léon.

“Our vision is to reimagine opportunities, techniques and organization models for small-plot intensive and underfinanced producers,” Sacco says.

These forest gardens are an economic boost to villagers and also sink enough carbon in the soil and generate enough plant and insect biodiversity to offset any environmental costs of taking cacao and vanilla beans by boat and train to Toronto.

 

Compassionate cacao

Business analyst Grayson Bass, who’s taught innovation strategies at the University of Toronto and is about to launch an Applied Innovation Certificate program there, thinks ChocoSolistas are spot on the money for a wide spectrum of change- and profit-making economic transformations of the near future.

Sooner rather than later, Bass says, social enterprises “will make the Fortune 500.” Why? Because they have compassion, he says. Compassion is not just a sign of emotional intelligence, he reasons. A “strong compassion muscle” is the precursor to business smarts, he says, because it leads innovators to ask the central question: What good does this do?

This gives compassionate entrepreneurs the edge they need to move up the ladder of innovation, he says.

On the lower steps on the ladder, innovators can optimize — find a faster, cheaper, more effective way of doing the same thing. They can also sustain — keep ahead of competitors by adding new services to an existing device.

At the top rung are disruptive innovators who change the nature of the game. To reach the highest rungs, entrepreneurs need to ask a “why” question, says Bass. That’s where companies such as ChocoSol excel, he says. Their “why” — a passion for a tasty health food that supports peasant producers and environmentally friendly production and distribution — leads them to change the consumer market for chocolate.

“Compassionate organizations have an advantage in solving problems and creating disruption because they have a problem to solve, not just a structure to fit into,” Bass says.

Sacco winces when business people call him compassionate or idealistic. “I don’t want to be called a hippie entrepreneur,” he says. “I’m offering a different value proposition.”

This fall, ChocoSol introduced “Halloween chocolate that isn’t scary” — no child labour and no environmental destruction. But that’s true of all their chocolate, including their seasonal Christmas Cranberry bar, dotted with local organic cranberries, or their Merry-Mint, made with dried mint grown on ChocoSol’s green roof. That roof is where cacao bean shells and other food wastes are composted to become soil to nourish new plants for tomorrow’s bars — the model of a circular economy, where yesterday’s waste becomes tomorrow’s food.

“My biggest challenge is focus,” says Sacco, who struggles with finishing his PhD, on the role of cacao and maize (corn) in Indigenous agriculture, while raising three children and managing an underfinanced social enterprise.

Affinity marketing

There are hidden strengths in a social enterprise, Sacco says. Having a cause helps define ChocoSol’s niche and also helps with customer loyalty, staff retention and developing new revenue streams, such as workshops for students, he says.

“We don’t lose any time selling, persuading or convincing customers to pay extra for real cacao mindfully produced. We work with the willing. That’s affinity marketing,” he says. “Our customers are our ambassadors, which is the best advertising we can afford.”

Sacco would like to see other social enterprises feature hundreds of other overlooked plant medicines that can be vehicles for stories — stories that are often suppressed by the way food is commonly marketed as a no-name and placeless commodity divorced from culture or social purpose.

This vision corresponds with the business scenario laid out to an agribusiness summit in New York in early December. Nick Fereday, of Netherlands-based Rabobank, a major banker to the global food and agriculture sector, predicted that today’s classic “Big Food” brands are doomed.

Upstarts “are tapping into the consumer trends of convenience, of health and wellness, of being a premium product and all wrapped up in a very, very strong mission statement,” Fereday told his audience of Big Food executives. If the big brands don’t smarten up, “we will see the end of iconic brands,” he warned. “By 2030, everything will be niche and focused on small markets.”

Alison Blay-Palmer, newly appointed UNESCO Chair in Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, agrees that food has what it takes to attract change-makers.

“Food provides a lever to address many intersecting challenges: climate change, biodiversity, rapid urbanization, health, equity, community well-being and more,” she says. “People who can envision how these issues are interconnected understand the potential of food for far-reaching transformation.”

Most of all, having a cause gets Sacco and his team of 25 full- and part-time staff to work every day. “I don’t think you can start with a business plan,” he says. “You need to start with something that calls you, or you’re off to a bad start.”

The post Lessons from pedal-powered ChocoSol appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Yet a company whose products are all based on microbes has been named the most sustainable company in the world in Corporate Knights’ Global 100 ranking. Chr. Hansen is a Danish bioscience company that dates back 140 years and “develops natural solutions for the food, nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries,” the company says.

“We develop and produce cultures, enzymes, probiotics and natural colors for a rich variety of foods, confectionery, beverages, dietary supplements and even animal feed,” adds CEO Mauricio Graber. “Our product innovation is based on more than 30,000 microbial strains that we call ‘good bacteria.’”
Chr. Hansen’s approach to sustainability is based around how it can contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), with 82% of the company’s revenue contributing to the targets.

“We believe the SDGs are a really good framework to translate our business into sustainability impact. We analysed our entire product portfolio to see which of the SDGs we had the most impact on and we decided to focus on three ‘strategic lighthouses,’” Graber says. “These are business areas we see as developing and growingaboth because of the commercial opportunities and the positive impact on the planet and sustainability.”

The first pillar of this strategy is food cultures, with the principal focus on bacteria that reduce food waste by prolonging the shelf life of food products, mainly yogurt and cheese. The company has a target of reducing yogurt waste by 1.2 million tonnes by 2022 from 2015 levels.

The second pillar is plant protection, which links to the SDG of sustainable agriculture. “We provide natural microbial solutions that can be used as an alternative to conventional pesticides while also increasing yields,” the CEO says. “It is much closer to the way that nature intended things and removes the risks and negative impacts of pesticides.”

Chr. Hansen is focusing on the megacrops – corn, sugarcane and soy – because they occupy the most land, but says its products are “crop-agnostic.” It is also working with the Danish Development Agency and Care Danmark on a project in Kenya to see if small-scale farmers can benefit from the same protection.

The third pillar is linked to the SDG of health and wellbeing. Central to this is to promote natural ingredients as a way to help gradually reduce the overuse of antibiotics in livestock farming and the impact of antibiotic resistance through the use of probiotic bacteria.

Chr. Hansen’s probiotics products help infants to develop good gut health, others can shorten the duration of the common cold and influenza-like illnesses. Chr. Hansen is researching how probiotics can help alleviate side effects from regular drugs.

One of the areas in the Global 100 ranking where Chr. Hansen performed particularly well was in the clean revenue category and in the representation of women on the board and in executive positions. It has recently appointed Dominique Reiniche as chairman of the board, making it the first large listed Danish company to have a female chairman. “We are in a growing battle for talent, and we need to improve diversity of all types,” Graber says.

Starting this year, the executive management board’s remuneration is also linked to the company’s targets on diversity, another area where it scored strongly.

Chr. Hansen’s success is based on a strategy of using natural solutions to address some of the key global megatrends, such as increasing food yields, reducing food waste and phasing out antibiotics in animal production, Graber says. “We are just at the start of the era of natural solutions using good bacteria,” he concludes.

Click here to return to the 2019 Global 100 landing page.

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“Is seaweed a vegetable?” a wide-eyed child asks a tall man chopping kelp at a “Taste the Nature” market in the Zuiderpark city farm in The Hague.

“Well, it has lots of vitamins and minerals,” the cook, Jethro van Luijk, replies.

“It does look like spinach,” says the child thoughtfully. But, unconvinced this plant is truly edible, he bounces away to other stalls displaying other wonders like organic snails and mushrooms grown from coffee grounds.

Under his pseudonym The Green Chef, Van Luijk is at the market to promote seaweed as the food of the future. He says along with the vitamins and minerals, seaweed is also full of protein, and cultivation requires no arable land, no fertilizer and no freshwater. And by growing it locally, he says, the Netherlands could wield a sustainable food source that has the added benefit of cleansing the seawater along the Dutch coast.

For today’s event he has teamed up with The North Sea Farm Foundation, which owns an experimental seaweed farm 15 kilometers (9 miles) out to sea from The Hague. He is here to help with a big problem: There’s not a big enough demand for Dutch seaweed to make growing it worthwhile.

Or is there?

Even though the North Sea Farm Foundation is still in the experimental stage — and even though a 2016 report found seaweed farming in the North Sea unlikely to turn a profit — two Dutch companies, Seamore and Zeewaar, have been slipping their seaweed into some of the country’s largest restaurant franchises and supermarkets. Combining clever marketing with environmental stewardship, they may have found the philosopher’s stone to a locally grown seaweed market eluding European and North American producers for decades.

Food of the Future

As he chops mushrooms and carrots for his kelp stew, van Luijk says that seaweed is a newcomer to Dutch cuisine.

“In Asia, eating seaweed is a very old tradition, and also in places that have a rocky coastline, like Norway and Scotland,” he says. “In the Netherlands, though, we’re in a delta. There are no rocks, so seaweed has nowhere to grow.”

He has hope, however, that large-scale cultivation will put Dutch seaweed on the menus of tomorrow. To this same end The North Sea Farm Foundation in 2014 set up a “Seaweed Platform” interest group to help advance the seaweed industry in the area.

The Seaweed Platform idea arrived at the same time as a report from The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, a prominent independent advisory body, which urged the government to adopt a food policy that would make ecological sustainability a top priority. The report quoted the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warning that global food production must rise 70 percent by 2050 to meet demand, and expressed concern that such an increase would be limited by environmental impacts. The report also noted that the country’s consumption of food and forestry products already required land equal to three times the country’s surface area.

Seaweed is often seen as an environmentally friendly food source because requires no land to grow. Wild harvest raises some concerns because of its potential to harm underwater ecosystems. But the Dutch government conducted research suggesting that 400 square kilometers (nearly 100,000 acres) of seaweed fields could be farmed in the North Sea with no negative impact.

In November 2016, a letter to the Dutch House of Representatives co-written by then State Secretary for Economic Affairs Martijn van Dam said the government would build a new food policy that would promote healthy food, ensure greater sustainability and develop new protein sources such as seaweed.

Just a few months later, van Dam was on a boat harvesting The North Sea Farm Foundation’s first crop of seaweed off the coast of The Hague. He came on shore to attend a one-off “Extraordinary Seaweed” event marking the occasion, made a seaweed wrap and then announced the investment of €5 million into a new program titled Seaweed for Food and Feed, involving The North Sea Farm Foundation among other industry players and research institutions.

“Seaweed is the food of the future: sustainable and healthy,” van Dam was quoted as saying at the announcement. “With this ‘innovation program’ we will focus on new food products that are produced sustainably and are attractive to a wide audience.”

Sustainable Alternative

Sarah Redmond, a seaweed farmer with Springtide Seaweed in Maine, U.S., says that interest in seaweed aquaculture has been growing strongly in recent years, but the North American industry has yet to take off.

“The seaweed aquaculture industry is still new and developing, so there are very few processing operations in place to process the new crops into saleable items,” Redmond says. She notes, however, that seaweed has a stellar potential if marketed as a sustainable alternative to other ingredients.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch seaweed distributor Seamore has used this approach to get its European Union–grown seaweed into over 500 stores in the Plus and Albert Heijn supermarket chains as of 2016. Its two main products, tagliatelle and seaweed bacon, are made from 100 percent organic, gluten free, non-GMO, vegan, low-carb seaweed.

Seamore’s approach has been to avoid unappetizing connotations of slimy weeds from the sea, and make their products a synonym for ingredients that consumers know and love. They then circumvent culinary confusion with a website packed full of videos, recipes and pictures, and encourage fans to send in their own creations.

“Of course, as with any innovation, educating consumers is a challenge that players will need to address,” says Seamore’s founder, Willem Sodderland.

Though one of the most successful Dutch seaweed businesses, Seamore actually sources its products from France and Ireland — still regional, but not quite local. The seaweed is also wild harvest. Sodderland says this was not desirable and due to a lack of supply and very high prices within the Netherlands for cultivated seaweed.

“Our vision is that ultimately almost all seaweed will be farmed,” he says.

Original Umami

Zeewaar is the first and only commercial Dutch seaweed farm and, according to co-founder Jennifer Breaton, the only certified organic seaweed farm in the whole EU. Though its product is more expensive than regional wild harvested seaweed, the company markets it to other businesses as an ingredient replacement with added sustainability — as well as good taste.

“Seaweed is the original umami,” says Breaton. “MSG was designed after the umami of seaweed. It’s a flavor enhancer. Dashi (Japanese stock) is all kelp.”

The pitch seems to have worked: Zeewaar has gotten its harvest into a surprising array of products, including salt, roasted peanuts, tea, chocolate and falafel balls. The roasted peanuts are sold by Hema, a major discount Dutch retailer, and the balls have found their way via Dutch food producer ProLaTerre into Ekoplaza, the largest organic supermarket chain in the Netherlands.

Flavor From the Sea

By far the most iconic of Dutch seaweed entrepreneurs, however, is The Dutch Weed Burger. The biggest customer of Zeewaar, it has turned the company’s two crops of royal kombu and sea lettuce into Weed Sauce (think mayonnaise), Sea Nuggets, Weed Dogs, Seawharmas and Weed Burgers.

“Just eating it raw? You have to be a hardcore lover of seaweed to do that,” says co-founder Mark Kulsdom. “But if you dose it nicely, you have the flavor from the sea without having a fish reference.”
Kusldom has just returned from his production facility with a stock of 30,000 seaweed burger patties to see him through the summer. In addition to his eponymous restaurant and food truck, he says he stocks over 200 Dutch businesses, including all 74 cafes in the nationwide Bagels & Beans chain.

Much like Seamore and Zeewaar, Kulsdom says that a certain comfort factor is key to his success.

“Burgers are a way in, because you can introduce the flavor, but there’s still a lot of familiarity to the product,” he says. “[Customers] know the burger, they know the toppings, they know how it looks, how to hold it and how to eat it.”

And with an easy-to-understand product and a sly name, Kulsdom says his restaurant is bringing in customers for adventurous, novel eating — vegan and non-vegan alike. Unlike the raw green product spurned by the child when this article began, Kulsdom has made Dutch seaweed something that, after a long and unlikely journey, can be found in the hippest of restaurants in the heart of Amsterdam.

The post Making seaweed mainstream appeared first on Corporate Knights.