Whether your farming ambitions are for animals, crops or both, you’ll need land. You’ll also need equipment, machinery and a lot of other supplies.
As with any small business, you’ll need to either work a day job or save up enough money to cover your cost of living until your farm starts to turn a profit.
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How does PepsiCo verify any offsets it’s using and verify regenerative practices on farms in its supply chain? How do you make sure that farmers are doing what they say they’re doing?
We don’t use offsets, with the exception of [Renewable Energy Certificates] RECs, which are well-established and broadly accepted. We don’t for a very specific reason, which is we think that the benefit should stay in the value chain.
We work very intensely to make sure that what we say happens is happening. That’s again with the partners who are on the ground. They all have responsibilities for measurement [and] verification. The farmers that are part of our programs make those agreements that they will provide that information, because ultimately, transparency plus accountability is what builds trust.
On top of that, I think that is a role for government. I think that government needs to provide the standards, the rules, if you will, for these things again. It will level up and make sure everybody’s doing the same thing. It will also take out a lot of the noise out of the system that exists today. A lot of farmers have said, ‘I’ve got multiple people coming at me. I just can’t deal with it.’ And so they step out entirely, which is not a good thing either.
Has PepsiCo ever cut off suppliers or farmers for failing to live up to what PepsiCo has set for its sustainability goals or its regenerative agriculture goals?
Yes, we have. We would much rather engage them because once you cut somebody off, you have no ability to have any influence whatsoever. So that is truly the last resort. I don’t believe in grains or potatoes because there, the farmers get it. I think in some of the other certain forestry crops, there’s been a few places where that’s happened.
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the Wall Street Journal reports.
— Ford is building more powerful combustion-engine trucks to subsidize the expansion of its electric vehicle business, according to Reuters.
— Developers in the U.S. are embracing technology already widely used in Asia that places solar panels on water. The Associated Press has that story.
Every Bottle Back.
Source: politico.com
