Bayer's Good Growing Link
Bayer’s Good Growing Link. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
If a consumer has a question about what a farmer is doing to become more sustainable the folks at Bayer CropScience are making it easier to answer that question. Brian Hrudka is the food chain manager for Bayer CropScience.
HRUDKA: The Good Growing Link is a tool. It’s a secure web page software tool that allows growers to identify, measure, improve and report their sustainability contributions. There’s a lot of interest in sustainability and I think it has become a little bit of a buzz word and it’s important to remember that agriculture in this country has been - I think they invented sustainability. There are so many farms that have been in family ownership for generations and the only reason that’s possible is because they’ve been sustainable.
Hrukda says this new tool is a way to help educate the consumer.
HRUDKA: We want to provide a tool for growers to tell that story and also help them improve because sustainability is always about continuous improvement so we want to provide a tool to help them continually improve and tell that story to the consumer world who really doesn’t understand it. I think there’s a lot of negatives, you know the whole Food Inc. thing and they don’t understand really that agriculture is as sustainable as it is.
Bayer CropScience expects the Good Growing Link will help the entire food chain demonstrate and communicate its commitment to sustainability—starting at the farm level.
HRUDKA: For example an irrigated grower might want to focus on water conservation. The Good Growing Link will give them a tool to describe what they’re doing to use less water and over a period of 2, 3, 4 years say that we’ve decreased our water consumption per case of potatoes or whatever it is by 1 or 2 or 5% so it helps them accomplish that and then tell the world about it.
The tool collects that data and generates a sustainability report. Once the report is created, users can create a link directly to their own website for public review or print to satisfy a customer’s specific sustainability criteria.
KRUDKA: We’re making it available to growers, to farmers. Ultimately the downstream food chain can use it too but we’re launched it at the Potato Expo. We did a pilot with three potato growers. We’re using the potato industry as sort of like a beta testing industry. We eventually hope to make it available to all growers, all different crops.
For more information visit their new site at goodgrowinglink.com
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
