We are delighted to welcome our new members that have joined the Cool Farm Alliance in January and February 2021 and look forward to strengthening and developing our Alliance together.
Ahold Delhaize is very much committed to sell more sustainable products to its customers. With a broad assortment and a wide variety of supply chains, the supermarket organisations that are part of Ahold Delhaize are in need of tools that calculate various metrics at farm level in an efficient, consistent and credible way. The Cool Farm Tool can play that important role and contribute to calculate and monitor the impacts created by the production of products that we sell. We want to work with our supply chains to reduce their negative impacts on the environment. For that purpose, Ahold Delhaize has formulated various internal and external ambitions. An important one is the subscription to the Science Based Targets initiative.
The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) is a global not-for-profit organisation and the largest cotton sustainability programme in the world. BCI exists to make global cotton production better for the people who produce it, better for the environment it grows in and better for the sector’s future. In the 2018-19 cotton season, BCI worked with 76 on-the-ground expert partners to deliver training and support to 2.3 million farmers in 23 countries. Together, licensed BCI Farmers produced 5.6 million tonnes of Better Cotton, or 22% of global cotton production.
CFA’s approach of working closely with academia and agricultural actors ensures the Cool Farm Tool’s methodologies are scientifically rigorous and highly credible. BCI is testing the Cool Farm Tool in a variety of contexts to complement its farm-level project data with modelled environmental metrics. BCI is pleased to join the Cool Farm Alliance and looks forward to contributing to their exciting work.
Ecosystem Services Trading Initiative (ESTI)
Healthy soils significantly contribute to mitigate climate change. CO2 is taken by plants from the atmosphere and sequestered as carbon in the soil. Almost 40% of the total earth’s surface is agricultural land, so it is clear that farmers can make an important positive contribution. A healthy soil also ensures better water storage and more biodiversity. We call these ecosystem services.
ESTI (Ecosystem Services Trading Initiative) encourages farmers to join sustainable soil & farm management by selling these ecosystem services, with maximum reward for farmers. ESTI is the key for SME farmers worldwide to sustainable profit. On the ESTI marketplace, farmers can sell their eco credits directly to customers (local and worldwide). ESTI offers a cheap and reliable marketplace with feasible protocols and secured registration. This offers the client maximum guaranteed environmental and climatological compensation and the farmer maximum income. Together, we call it ‘impact rewarded’. ESTI plans to use the Cool Farm Tool as part of their different approaches to plan, monitor and report carbon farming activities.
European Carbon Farmers is on a mission of putting each European farmer at the centre of climate change mitigation efforts. What drives us is a vision that in the near future the agricultural sector in the EU will be fully emissions regulated. So, if you are a farmer and you are net emitter of GHG, you will have to pay for what you are emitting. If we would be in such scenario right now, most of the European farms are out of business. This is the scenario we are trying to prevent.
In order to achieve this, we are creating an agricultural carbon credit market in order to encourage this transition – very importantly! – in a financially viable way. Farm emission measurements, enabled by the Cool Farm Tool, are the key activity enabling monetisation of agricultural carbon credits.
Hummingbird Technologies is a data science and artificial intelligence business that provides advanced crop and field analytics to its customers by using remote sensing imagery and proprietary algorithms. We offer precision agronomy tools that facilitate optimised agrochemical inputs, and in addition we can detect, monitor and verify sustainable farming practices such as cover crops, crop rotations and reduced tillage. These tools can streamline sustainable agriculture reporting and ultimately enable sustainable farming to be rewarded through carbon credits, supply chain certification schemes or government subsidies.
By working together with the Cool Farm Alliance, we want to push the boundaries of science and technology in order to improve the efficiency of global crop production, helping to feed the world’s growing population sustainably. We look forward to working with the Cool Farm Alliance, offering our users a range of solutions to monitor and scale up sustainable agricultural practices.
We are the world’s largest market research and data company that specialises in agriculture and animal health markets. With offices in 32 countries and working in over 80 countries each year, one of our products, FarmTrak, is an annual tracking study that records the activities of 300,000 statistically representative farmers across 41m hectares.
FarmTrak’s data includes the inputs required by the Cool Farm Tool, enabling us to estimate GHG emissions for 60 crops at a 10km x 10km resolution in 54 countries. Beyond these data, our business undertakes over 1,000 privately commissioned projects each year, collecting data from farmers, agronomists, veterinarians, distributors and manufacturers.
Our mission is to support agri-food industry decisions with high quality, reliable and insightful data and recommendations.
Laudes Foundation is an independent foundation joining the growing movement to accelerate the transition to a climate-positive and inclusive global economy. Laudes supports brave action that inspires and challenges industry to harness its power for good. Part of the Brenninkmeijer family enterprise, Laudes builds on six generations of entrepreneurship and philanthropy, working collaboratively to both influence finance and capital markets and transform industry with a focus on the built environment and fashion.
Responding to the dual crises of climate breakdown and inequality, the foundation’s Materials programme is focused on transforming the global fashion industry’s material mix. Towards this, one of the three key priority areas is to support the transition of business models to sourcing from regenerative production landscapes – a jurisdictional model to foster agricultural ecosystems which conserve and enhance natural resources and build community resilience whilst enabling business to source responsibly. A critical component of this approach is to enable local leaders, policymakers and businesses with robust evidence to plan, finance and track progress. This partnership provides us with the platform to engage with leading agriculture businesses and other stakeholders to further support development of tools for the management and monitoring of environmental impact.
As the leading organic yogurt maker, Stonyfield takes care with everything it puts into its products and everything it keeps out. By saying no to toxic persistent pesticides, artificial hormones, antibiotics and GMOs, Stonyfield has been saying yes to healthy food, healthy people, and a healthy planet for 35 years. Stonyfield, a Certified B-Corp, is also helping to protect and preserve the next generation of farmers and families through programs like its Direct Milk Supply and Wolfe’s Neck Organic Training Program as well as StonyFIELDS, a nationwide, multi-year initiative to help keep families free from pesticides in parks and playing fields across the country. Stonyfield has a Science Based Target and is working to reduce emissions across our operations and supply, including on farm. We are a founding member of OpenTEAM and plan to use the Cool Farm Tool as part of our farm GHG measurement activities.