Looking Up & Thinking Through

Imagine removing the guardrails against weather and market threats keeping industrial agriculture on a viable road today. How will farms avoid falling into the ditches?

Today it was announced that lawmakers in the EU have reached an agreement that sets out obligations for companies to identify, assess, prevent, mitigate, address and remedy impacts under the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The impacts to be measured are many, including field-level emissions and deforestation, which will require segregation of crops to maintain market access.

It goes without saying that Europe is a big market. Almost all of the raw ingredients produced in North American commodity agriculture will need to be reported on, since the companies that procure them operate globally and significantly in all jurisdictions of Europe’s end use markets.

Contemplating Major Change

Human beings by nature do not like changes forced upon them, which for many years has driven industrial agriculture’s lobbyists to defend the status quo in hopes of preventing new policies such as this. Meanwhile, entities have emerged that don’t need lobbyists to fight for them and to hide behind, thanks to a belief system that embraces freedom.

It’s a bit ironic in a sense. The very same ideology that causes resistance – “leave me alone so that I can do what I want in the same way I always have” – can be flipped around to create opportunities – “I’m free to do what I want because I took the initiative to change how I do things before it was forced upon me”.

Without exception, the fear of making a major change in their operations is all but eliminated in farmers that have projected financial outcomes and thoroughly contemplated the various scenarios. When the worst-case scenario after implementing the change looks better than the current financial picture, the steps to be taken become painless.

Case Study: Rye/Soybean Relay Cropping