03/13/07 Is It Sustainable?

Is it sustainable? I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. The Food Alliance has recently unveiled a new online tool designed to allow farmers them to compare their current management practices with "best practices" for sustainable agriculture. Scott Exo, Executive Director, Food Alliance explains. EXO: The self assessment tool grew out of something that Food Alliance already had. We've been in the business of providing benchmarks in a certification for sustainable ag practices for almost 10 years and what we realized was that their utility, the certification standards utility as a benchmarking tool only came into play when farmers or ranchers decided that they wanted to try to achieve certification. Exo says it becoming more and more important for producers to be certified. EXO: We're finding that a growing number of food buyers in the retail food service and restaurant business are wanting that kind of verification of practices used to grow the food because the customers are asking them questions about where that food came from and how it was grown. We're seeing growing attention to animal welfare issues; people are concerned about pesticide use. Food Alliance also provides certification services for food processors and manufacturers and that's to ensure both the traceability of products that come from the farm and become an ingredient in a further processed product. While the online tool is really designed as an assessment, Exo says it can be used to towards certification. EXO: If somebody goes through the questions and finds at the end; at the end, they get a scorecard and the scorecard will tell them how they did based on the responses with respect to Food Alliances certification program. And if they find that they score enough to qualify for certification according to their answers or they're very close and are willing to make a few changes to qualify, they have the option of submitting those responses in the form of an online application to us and that can actually streamline their application process for certification. The free online tool was made possible with support from USDA Risk Management Agency. Visit the Food Alliance web site at www.foodalliance.org for more information. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.