Sustainable Barley

Administrator for the Idaho Barley Commission, Kelly Olsen, told me that Anheuser Busch is very interested in sustainability as it relates to Idaho barley production. "They want to lead in environmental and sustainable production of beer and that flows down to raw materials which means barley. They have worked closely and offer programs for producers to improve their water use efficiency and I think it is paying dividends for farmers. The sustainability initiative has had a mixed review among barley producers primarily because they might be somewhat suspicious about why this initiative requires a lot of data collection so that they can understand what the baseline water use is and other production practices. That's important in order to measure future performance and progress in these key areas. You have to identify what is happening today and I think that that data collection phase is always concerning to producers. How is the data going to be used, who has access to it, would it be used against them at some point in the future? The company might say well, we can get more efficiently produced barley somewhere else and they will walk away from their commitment to producers in this region.