The Sustainable Agricultural Partnerships conference, hosted last week in San Francisco by American Business Conferences, represents a significant shift in the agricultural supply chain. In recent years, key industry players have finally caught onto the need for a sustainable overhaul of the U.S. food supply chain. At the Food Marketing Institute's 2009 Sustainability Summit, for example, large-scale retailers and suppliers warned of the dire implications for the food industry of feeding a population expected to double by 2050, a water supply that continues to shrink at a startling pace, a dwindling supply of seafood due to overfishing, and the skyrocketing costs of fossil fuels.

If last week's conference was any indication, the conversation among growers, processors, suppliers, and retailers has advanced significantly since then, as the industry comes to terms with these imminent realities. But the inertia of entrenched business practices, and a chain of suppliers that have traditionally remained isolated link-by-link, leaves certain core problems remaining to be solved.

In this light, the event's two-day program was decidedly ambitious. Deliberately reaching out to a multi-stakeholder crowd, both the audience and the speaker roster featured independent farmers and small-scale growers alongside corporate powerhouses like Nestle and Dole. This immediately shifted the dynamic of the conference, bringing a modicum of practically to the panels and ensuing discussions.

The underlying premise driving the programming focused on balancing the triple bottom line: people, planet, and profits. Kevin Rabinovitch, Director of Sustainability for Mars, Inc., laid out the challenge of addressing these three components in a complex industry with such a diverse supply chain.

"The agricultural system is not a factory," he said. "It's an open system" that necessarily requires a more complex approach in terms of metrics and systems design. With a program covering everything from systems implementation (LCA metrics, carbon trading, traceability), to specific-issue management (water conservation and toxicity, carbon sequestration, chemical toxicity, and more), SAP certainly covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time.

Cooperation vs. Competition

There are numerous ongoing attempts to address this complexity, and the common refrain of "what gets measured, gets managed" cropped up again and again. The struggle for this industry (as with many grappling with sustainability issues) is one of competition: how do otherwise competitive businesses come together to exchange the level of detail necessaryt o make truly informed decisions?

One project making significant progress in this area is the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, launched in 2008 and currently set to roll out its pilot program this year.

Developed through a multi-stakeholder process in an effort to provide common language and benchmarking tools, the Index is developing specific metrics for measuring sustainable outcomes throughout specialty agriculture. With 420 participants and 43 meetings over nine metric areas -- and a pilot program consisting of over 100 growers across 14 different crops -- the Stewardship Index might be the most striking example industry-wide data sharing yet. A similar effort, called Field to Market, is studying the impacts of commodity crops.

The information garnered from such projects is indispensable to making sustainable decisions along the supply chain, particularly when it comes to prioritization. But even more finite studies provide crucial input when it comes to decision-making.

A life cycle assessment of the supply chain by New Zealand's leading dairy co-op reveals, for example, that a whopping 85 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions occurs on the farm.

Against this backdrop, it's no wonder that the vast majority of the event's sessions addressed farm-specific practices such as water use, nitrogen efficiency, soil stewardship, and farmer engagement. As Mars' Kevin Rabinovitch pointed out, the agricultural industry has a unique advantage in its search for sustainability: with the right systems in place, agriculture actually has the ability to offset nearly all of its environmental impact through mitigation (using fewer resources, increasing efficiency, changing behaviors, etc. -- in other words, better farming).

Starting with the Farm

There's a pretty big dilemma that needs to be resolved before this optimism becomes practical reality. During a break-out session on how to engage farmers in the process of reducing greenhouse gases, Saskatchewan farmer John Bennett bluntly articulated what would become the driving tension throughout the conference: the small-scale farmer doesn't exactly work on the same field as the rest of his or her supply chain.

Next Page: A Catch-22 for Sustainability-Minded Farmers