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Farming Is Striving For Net Zero Impacts

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Mature brands are often innovating to keep up with the changing times and help the planet as a whole.  Think of an innovation flywheel that includes not just consumer need states but also environmental, social and internal stakeholder need states. 

In an effort to look at how mature, more traditional brands are bringing major innovation to our daily lives, I spoke to David Darr, senior vice president and chief strategy and sustainability officer for Dairy Farmers of America one of the largest dairy cooperatives that owns well-known regional brands (Meadow Gold, Kemps, Plugra, Friendly’s and more) and also sells milk and dairy ingredients to recognizable retail and food service brands around the world.

Jeff Fromm: Can you just tell me a little bit about DFA's purpose and how important sustainability is to living that purpose?

David Darr: Purpose is your essence, or to some degree, your soul of who you are, what you believe and how you operate. For us, we are truly a purpose driven organization starting with our family farm owners. What they do, day in and day out, has the opportunity to enrich the communities we serve and lives of those our products touch. Our mission, vision, and values of our organization are the foundation of our Cooperative.  At DFA our mission is really simple: it’s all about delivering value as a global dairy cooperative to the dairy family farmers who are the owners of DFA.

When you're talking about purpose, I think ours is really captured by our vision, which is to enrich communities through all the possibilities of dairy. And for us, sustainability is a big part of that. When we can deliver dairy products to consumers that make a wonderful experience for your family, whether it's through ice cream, the cheese on your pizza, or your yogurt at breakfast, then we can make people feel great through dairy, as well as doing that in a way that also is supporting families in rural America.  

Fromm: How big a voice do the farmers have when it comes to influencing sustainable farming in the future?

Darr:  The great thing about a cooperative system is the farmers are the owners. So every day, we are working directly with farmers, listening to them, engaging with them, learning in terms of the practices that they're using and how they're continuing to evolve sustainability practices on farms. They continue to push the envelope on excellent care for their animals, better stewardship of their land and quality workplaces for their employees. And for us, the ability to proactively engage with our farmers brings credibility, brings authenticity, and deepens our purpose around sustainability. 

Fromm: DFA is the first U.S. co-op to set science-based environmental targets committing to being net zero by 2050.  Is this achievable? Is it ambitious enough? 

Darr:  Yeah, I think it's definitely achievable, but not easy. Our goals on sustainability start with our belief that dairy farms are the original stewards of the land, and they are continually improving practices that are good for the environment. And we believe the dairy farmers and farming can be a part of environmental solutions. Our farmers have already invested in renewable energy on their farms from solar panels to converting manure into bio-gas. Through practices like no-till and cover crops, they are already well on the way to sequestering carbon in their soils. Finally, we as a dairy co-op have used our CoLab innovation accelerator to find and support new emerging ideas such as adding cilantro and seaweed additives to what farmers feed their cows, which has the potential to cut cow emissions by up to a third. 

It's our farmers that have enabled us to set these stretching goals that allow us to be more proactive and more engaging with our customers as they're thinking about what their goals for sustainability and the environment are. And it really allows that farmer voice, the farmer influence to have a ripple much farther and much deeper in the supply chain than what they have in other sorts of production systems or business relationships that's really unique and special to a cooperative.

Honestly, we don't know exactly everything that we're going to do to be able to achieve these ambitious goals, but we're well on our way to building out the roadmaps to get it done.

Fromm: DFA has a Gold Standard Dairy program where you visit farmers and track and benchmark best practices on sustainability. Would it be possible for you to share some individual stories?

Darr: We realized that brands and customers were definitely looking for much more detail around supply chains. And putting on my economist hat, we were looking for ways that we could evolve to have a better understanding of what our farmers are doing so that we could talk more quantifiably about what they're doing, versus just qualitatively. And now, we have robust programs to evaluate our members on animal care, environmental stewardship, farm safety and training. 

I can think of members of ours in Western New York, the Noble family, that are the seventh generation on the same farm and multiple generations in the dairy industry and dairy business. As they've continued to look for ways to grow their family operation and to bring future generations back to the dairy and farming operations, they've invested in anaerobic digesters to produce electricity and renewable energy. They went steps further than that and are actually, in their communities and across parts of New York, bringing in food waste from retailers and other food manufacturers to repurpose that through their anaerobic digesters and keep it out of landfills. It's allowing them to create more jobs in their communities. It's allowing them to grow their family business. And we're seeing opportunities in other food companies coast to coast now looking at how dairy farms can be solutions or part of solutions for food waste. And whether it's from a retailer, whether it's from a food manufacturing plant, where can you have this combination of food waste and dairy animal byproducts and manure to bring economic and environmental solutions to communities?

Fromm: I’d be interested in your thoughts on the intersection of sustainability and innovation.

Darr:  Innovation is critical for us. 

For us, that can be new and different retail packages and products that we're making, such as new brands we've invested in like Live Real Farms. With our recent acquisition of Dean Foods assets, we're investing more in branding and local marketing of regional brands that really have strong connections to consumers in their area.

But if I pull it back to the farm level, there continues to be a tremendous opportunity and tremendous excitement and openness from farmers on how they can leverage innovation and technology to do things differently and maybe better. The use of robotics on farms is continuing to take off and grow quickly in terms of how cows are milked. We see other opportunities with robotics. We're seeing farms experimenting with technologies around artificial intelligence and machine learning that could just give them much more specific, granular information on the health and wellness of each animal that allows them to provide even better care for each individual animal and their farm. 

Fromm: As a business-to-business supplier to some of the biggest CPG brands in the world, as well as major retailers, what do you see as the likely path in terms of what consumers expect?

Darr: I think we're going to see, as we go forward, more consumers making more of their purchasing decisions align with some of their beliefs and philosophies around sustainability and to put their dollars behind brands and products that aren't just saying they're doing the right things, but that are able to back it up and improve it with data.

And with our customers, we are starting to see a transition away from just surveys or questionnaires and more desires to have, what I'll call partnerships, and investments in the area of sustainability to bring more authenticity to their sustainability messaging and bring more transparency to sustainability practices within their supply chain. And those are all areas that we feel dairy and dairy farmers can not only compete, but can really thrive in. And that the good things that farmers are doing and our ability as a cooperative that is owned by farmers to be able to communicate those practices, those accomplishments, those successes directly through our own brands or through our customers' brands, places dairy in a position to be very successful and to remain in the center of consumers' purchasing decisions as they're going to their favorite grocery store or restaurant, and in wanting to make decisions that include sustainability. We think dairy can be an important part of that.


For questions about this interview please contact Jeff at jfromm@barkleyus.com

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