The Brand/Farmer Connection: An interview with Carl Jorgensen on Morning News Beat
Video: https://youtu.be/VHDmQhSrQMw
The Brand/Farmer Connection
In this interview with Kevin Coupe of Morning News Beat I discuss the growing trend of brands making direct connections with farmers. Large and small brands are finding that they can have more control over the quality, price and availability of key ingredients if they develop direct relationships with farmers. The vagaries of global supply chains, the commodity grain markets and unprecedented adverse weather events make creating proprietary supply chains a good business decision. Reducing supply risk by directly contracting with farmers, and training and enrolling new farmers into your program, supports sustainable growth plans for brands. New techniques of regenerative agriculture are helping farms become more climate-resilient, by regenerating the soil to effectively manage both massive rains and droughts. Today’s consumer is more than ever interested in how and where their food is produced, and by whom. The brand-farmer connection provides opportunities for authentic brand storytelling.
Big Brands
Anheuser-Busch’s Michelob ULTRA®'s Pure Gold organic beer brand, is recruiting farmers to grow organic barley. The CCOF Foundation helped organize meetings between organic and conventional farmers to help them learn organic farming and make the 3-year transition to organic certification.
Danone offers dairy farmers contracts to produce milk to their specifications and offers funding to participate in soil research with 23 dairies across 50,000 acres in 10 states — tracking at least 28 varieties of cover and cash crops. It hopes to double that acreage over the next two years, and to help farmers invest in the new equipment and seeds that might be required to switch to new regenerative agriculture practices.
General Mills’ started a pilot program on 50,000 acres with 45 oat farmers in North Dakota and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. General Mills, owner of the Cheerios and Nature Valley brands, is one of the largest purchasers of oats in the food industry. In 2019, General Mills announced that it will advance regenerative agriculture practices on one million acres of farmland by 2030. This year it launched its Regenerative Oat Pilot in its oat-sourcing regions in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota.
The pilot project partnering with regenerative farmer and rancher, Gabe Brown of North Dakota and his company, Understanding Ag, to work one-on-one with 45 farmers to develop and implement a customized, three-year regenerative management plan specific to each operation.
General Mills added a second effort that focuses on a vitally important ingredient for its Gold Medal flour and Pillsbury product lines, wheat. It includes 24 wheat farmers with operations in and around a 650,000-acre watershed in Kansas.
Upfield’s brand Country Crock which was acquired from Unilever about 2 ½ years ago, has an initiative called The Cover Crop Project (https://www.countrycrock.com/our-story/cover-crops), which is actively recruiting soybean farmers in Eastern Kansas and Western Missouri.
Smaller Brands
Owner Kristy Lewis started Colorado-based Quinn Snacks 10 years ago when her son Quinn was born. Her goal was to “clean up” microwave popcorn with its use of harmful chemicals. Her quest for a better popcorn product led her to connect with Dave Vetter, an organic farmer and owner of Grain Place Foods, an organic processing facility in Marquette, Nebraska.
Minneapolis-based muesli manufacturer Seven Sundays sources organic oats and other grains from farmers in Iowa and Minnesota as part of a larger project to increase small grain production in the Midwest.
Oat milk manufacturer Oatly is sourcing oats directly from Midwest farmers, with the requirement that they do not use glyphosate as a pre-harvest dessicant, an otherwise widespread practice in which a farmer “terminates” a crop by killing it with Roundup herbicide prior to harvest, which speeds up the drying of the crop, making it easier to harvest on schedule and requiring less post-harvest drying.
Applegate Farms is partnering with Amish organic dairy farmers in Kalona, Iowa on its line Non-GMO Project Verified cheeses.
Victory Hemp Foods is working with farmers in northern Michigan and Montana to grow hemp for food-grade hempseeds. One of their growers, Vollmar Family Farms, plans to take their commitment to sustainable farming further and receive Silver Level Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC).
I am working with members of the Plant Based Foods Association to create domestic supply chains for key ingredients such as dried yellow peas, chickpeas, oats and wheat for wheat gluten. At present the majority of ingredients used to manufacture plant-based foods are imported. American farmers are largely not benefiting from U.S. sales of one of the fastest-growing food categories.