NRDC: Working on the Farm
JONATHAN KAPLAN
Senior policy specialist for NRDC's health and environment program and an expert on sustainable food
You have played an integral role in developing the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops. What sparked the idea?
This index is like an accounting system for sustainable agriculture and sustainable food production. Accountants have all kinds of metrics -- price-to-earnings ratios, protocols for evaluating a company's financial health -- but we don't really have anything like that for sustainability. The Stewardship Index will provide that. The industry needed a system of measuring sustainable performance for farmers, food processors, packers, shippers, and retailers alike.
How is this different from imposing new regulations?
The Stewardship Index is quantitative and science-based, and we're measuring things we know that all the participants care about. How much water do you use? How much nitrogen are you applying to your crops? What's the quantity and toxicity of your pesticide mix? We're not prescribing the best practices to improve those kinds of scores. We reveal the best practices throughout the whole system, but we're not telling growers or others how to run their business. We think that's going to leave innovation in the hands of the operator, of the farmer, to figure out which systems work best.
What benefits do you see to this approach?
One advantage is that the Index will allow anyone to start immediately, regardless of their performance level. You could be the most sustainable grower in the country and still be able to use this tool to figure out how you can improve further. At the same time, you can be the least sustainable operator in the system and you can start today to figure out how to be more efficient with your water use, your energy, your chemicals, etc.
How will farmers and others in the supply chain access this program and put it to use in the real world?
The Stewardship Index isn't ready to be used in the marketplace -- it's still in the pilot phase -- but the vision is to create an online toolkit where anybody can log in, upload information about their farm inputs and outputs, share that data with others in their supply chain, and demonstrate progress over time. So it's a supply chain–wide tool. We have Walmart, Cisco, Unilever, Sedexo, and large buyers of fruit and vegetable crops engaged in the process. If those folks agree to use the tool, then we think that will create a lot of incentive for upstream operators to improve their practices.