Name: Regenerative farming will take multiple stakeholders to take off
Uploaded: 2022-04-04
Duration: 6 min 34 s
Description: Farmers need large retailers like Walmart to push the transition to a more sustainable agricultural future.

Farmers need large retailers like Walmart to push the transition to a more sustainable agricultural future.

Regenerative farming will take multiple stakeholders to take off

Environment

Regenerative farming will take many stakeholders to take off

it's true that we have to change the system. But what it means is that we have to change the farms, right? And so what we want is we want integrated farms, we generated farms not regenerative practices, right? Because that's the problem. It's all at the practice level. We are coming to realize that that there is a lot of potential within agriculture to address a lot of our biggest land resource concerns and climate change issues. But there's just not enough emphasis on what it means. If we want to work with agriculture, what does it cost to make that happen? Yeah, I'm laura gentry, I'm the director of water quality research for the Illinois corn growers Association and I'm a soil scientist. So soil scientist studying the chemical, physical and biological properties of our soil. My particular area focuses on agriculture and specifically on maintaining soil quality and soil health. In row crop agricultural, there have been many, many terms for regenerative agriculture. That's sort of the term du jour right now, always the idea is producing safe healthy crops with a reduced environmental impact, maintaining clean water and healthy soils, precision agriculture tools that can help farmers to make better decisions around nutrient utilization, chemical utilization and make sure that more of it ends up in the crop where it's intended versus running off into our water or remaining in our soil. If you really want to be a regenerative, what you have to see is changes in greenhouse gas emissions, right from agriculture and changes in other environmental indicators from habitat water quality, right? It's just such a complex system that if you want to make any change, it's really hard to do that, as just one individual firmer large corporations should be looking to to assist farmers because ultimately they will benefit from from helping us to do well to be competitive, whether they're doing it to be able to make public facing environmental commitments around water quality or climate change or whatever, or whether they're just doing it because they're stakeholders are demanding it. There's plenty of reasons out there for these large corporations to work directly with farmers to help them to have a reduced impact on the environment. My name is Michael Hancock and I oversee implementation of our sustainability in the shows for food and grocery areas globally. At Walmart, we came up with three sustainability initiatives through Moonshot goals and that was really, we want to be powered by 100% renewable energy, We wanted to create zero waste or have zero waste in our supply chains, and then three is we wanted to sell sustainable products that were good people on the planet. The midwest collaborative has eight members from the corporate sector and walmart is one of those and then three of the big Ngos, we really look at the sort of three legs stool of support for farmers and so that is the uh financial support, so that's cost share for, you know, buying a cover crop seed and making sure that they have the right equipment, it's technical support so that they know how to do it and that they can ask questions from agronomists and other farmers do that have been doing this and then it's the social support, that big picture vision is what guides us every day. You can really see significant change in that landscape, um particularly if you're looking at things like water quality, soil health, biodiversity factors, things like that first and foremost is we want to manage the system that we already have in the office today. And so one of the things that we can do on that, because there's a lot of work that can still take place. I think when you take a look at grain rotation or different types of products that can be grown to be able to assist on that, that definitely is really good. We want to be able to minimize the inputs that go into production citizens what were clearly looking to do is to continue to lean in on the current calculators that exists for the science based targets. And as those calculators are developed by the leading scientists that are out there, we will read those tools and the access available to our suppliers. The bigger picture is that if we want to promote a sustainable regenerative system, we should have a more diverse production system reflected in a more diverse retail system, walmart is at the tail end of the supply chain and our greatest power, more design availability or our ability to convene right and send a signal to the marketplace on what we would like to see in terms of practices to deliver on the outcomes that are really going to be necessary to sustain our planet. Consumer pressure is critical in moving USDA and state level policies into A more truly regenerative direction. These big corporations that we can channel, if you will some of these consumer concerns, but everybody has to share some responsibility really. The buck stops with the farmer, everybody upstream of the farmer is looking down their nose going, how hard is it? And you know, why don't you sit down with one of these farmers and talk to them about how hard it is. We're not asking you to give up 15% of your income. Why do you expect that from from farmers? If we are really serious about reducing climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, what we need to do is eat less meat, Whatever meat we eat, we need to bring it back as often as possible to pasture. That will reduce the demand for grain as it reduces the demand for grain. It opens up spaces for growing things like being things that human schemes you really can't settle in the margins here. It's a problem solved. We are acutely aware of the impact that we're having on our soils, we do feel a responsibility to be sure that the next generation is going to be able to produce crops, produced food produced fiber and fuel, with the resource that we're leaving behind our soil is a national treasure. We need to maintain it. Yeah.