Silos & Stories
Individuals interested in, or even working within industrial agriculture and food systems face a major challenge to know how the business operates from one end to the other.
From government policy makers to retail consumers, through all sectors of agriculture and food at every stage of the supply chain, confusion reigns. Dominant narratives can be difficult and dangerous to challenge, and emotions can bias perspectives.
Production, procurement, trading, processing and packaging systems are global, complex, and operate behind iron curtains. Global food and agriculture was set up in silos, and to this day, there is scant communication between different departments.
Siloed thinking = Siloed decision-making
Let’s suppose for a moment that people are motivated exclusively by financial incentives. Within commodity corporations, compensation is typically tied to the profitability of an individual’s ‘book of business,’ or the collective return on investment (ROI) of a specific trading desk or division.
With profitability as the primary financial incentive facing managers and business decision-makers, food and agriculture corporations aren’t getting ground-level buy-in to sustainability initiatives. To change the impact that the business has on the environment, bonus-style financial incentives are needed to drive changes in that specific direction.
Enter: Marketing & Sustainability Teams
Full of bright young environmentalists usually, marketing and sustainability teams operate near to where broad corporate commitments are made. Compared to merchants, middle managers and country agents in corporate agribusiness firms, the marketing and sustainability teams work at a high level on behalf of the entire corporation, its shareholders and employees.
Meanwhile out in the country, layer upon layer of conflicting information swirls in rural communities between corporations’ local staff and their farmer customers.
Company traders, who tend to direct country purchasing, will not bring up sustainability until one of their customers directly asks for it, no matter what the corporate marketing department says to the public.
Farm and industry groups, with big budgets to market to farmers and the public, stick to traditional messages and shallow, if any, considerations of the impact of industrial agriculture on rural environments.
Government policy makers on multiple levels scrambling to box in the damage being caused by conventional practices, and to establish financial incentives for farmers to make land management improvements.
The farm media, beholden to shareholders – and advertisers.
Industry peers sharing similar but slightly different experiences in a coffee shop setting can tend to present incomplete information as fact.
Consumer Silos
It’s within a similar context that food consumers receive layer upon layer of conflicting misinformation, at too far of a distance from the source to make fair and complete decisions about what to believe. Many want to ‘vote with their dollars’ to support the type of farming that aligns with their values, and end up defaulting to label claims in the natural food product category that may or may not legitimately deliver on stated promises.
Consumer silos look like camps that tend to exclusively favor organic, vegan, plant-based, pastured, free-from, and other attempts at clean label. All of this is set to reinvent itself in response to the tidal wave of consumer interest coming with support for regenerative.
Award-winning movies like Common Ground, set to premiere next month, have the power to scale interest in regenerative agriculture quickly. Hopefully, with this level of exposure and enthusiasm, the silos will dissolve helping people unite over simple shared values like soil health.
Where to Next
In an inspiring move by Wildfarmed, first written about here last April, sourdough bread that can be traced back to participating farms is being sold in Marks & Spencer, a prominent UK grocery chain. A true, commercial farm-to-shelf regenerative value chain - offering an exciting model and an important case study to monitor.