Food Companies Wanting Farm-Level Data
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
As large food companies aim to reduce their carbon footprint, their single largest contributor of greenhouse gasses are often the farms from which they source their ingredients.
Reinke… “So when they talk about scope 3 emissions and those companies needing to reach their targets, if they're trying to reduce corporate emissions by 40 or 50 percent or something like that, agriculture is the single largest share of their overall emissions in a lot of cases. So that's where these companies are looking to work with the farmers who are ultimately supplying one of their major inputs and help those farmers help them reduce their emissions towards those corporate targets.”
That’s Nick Reinke, CEO of HabiTerre, who says now the challenge is having adequate data in the supply chain for companies to know what is happening at the field level.
Reinke… “So they quickly move to needing better data for what they're gathering. But then if they want to make progress towards the goals, that's where they get to investing in farmers, supporting farmers in practice change, trying to influence that however they can. And ultimately then you need the associated data to say, okay, we maybe influenced some practice change here. Now, what was the change that resulted from that practice change that we influenced? If you're going to track progress, you're going to need a lot better data and that's just logistically and cost-prohibitive. It's very difficult for them to get. So we're trying to streamline that process.”
These on-farm practices are of great interest to HabiTerre. Learn more at habiterre.com.
