PRESIDENTIAL PARADIGMS
American Farms Are Leading the Way in Sustainability
Bob Stallman, President, American Farm Bureau Federation
Americans love a good
story and we love a good
meal. All the better when the
two can go hand-in-hand.
Consumers are eager for
more stories about their food.
They want to know where
each meal comes from and
how it's grown.
The market responds, but only haltingly. Walk
into a grocery store and you can find just about
every label imaginable--free range, non-GMO,
organic, gluten-free and natural--you name it,
there's a label for it. Some of these labels are
helpful, but none of them can fully tell the story
of American agriculture. That's up to us farmers.
We need to tell the
story instead of
letting others define
who we are.
Consider
the mantra of
sustainability. It's
today's buzzword,
but it's been our
way of life for a
century or more.
Farmers are
producing more
food with less
land, water and
pesticides, and we can prove it. Thanks to tools
like Field to Market's Fieldprint Calculator, we
can track our efficiency and environmental impact
and share the impressive results. Our practices
may vary, but we all know the importance of
protecting our resources. Our livelihoods depend
on it.
Whether conventional or organic, we all work
hard to produce the highest quality food for our
customers as affordably as we can. American
farms are growing more food using less water
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and energy, all while protecting the soil for future
crops. We need to get out there and tell consumers
how we're making this happen.
We need to tell people in cities and suburbs-cubicle dwellers and factory workers--about
the new technology we're using. They need to
know how we are growing more crops on less
land with less soil erosion than ever before. Even
water use is down thanks to better equipment and
genetically modified seeds.
Big data systems let us zero in on fields to
use the exact amount of water, seed and crop
protection each crop needs. Average consumers
don't know how practices like conservation tillage
are protecting our soil, but we can teach them. We
can explain how
homegrown fuels
like ethanol are
cutting greenhouse
gas emissions. We
can proudly share
more about how we
rotate our crops and
use conservation
plans to keep
the soil healthy.
Cover crops, green
manure, grassland
preservation, notill techniques--all
this and more are
mysteries to non-farmers.
Agriculture has a great story of sustainability
to share. Conventional and organic alike--we're
keeping America fed and preserving our valuable
resources for generations to come. People need to
hear it straight from the ones who know it best.