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Tesco’s CEO Calls On Food Industry To Tackle Food Waste
Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste.
Posted By: Martin White on: September 25, 2018
Tesco CEO Dave Lewis will today call on the global food industry to be more transparent and publish their food waste data, to ensure that no food goes to waste across the global food chain.
Lewis will announce his call for action at the Champions 12.3 conference in New York today, and a statement from the retailer said that 27 of Tesco’s major suppliers such as Müller Milk & Ingredients, Kerry and Arla will soon publish their food waste data for the first time.
The statement also claimed that major branded Tesco suppliers such as Mars, General Mills and Unilever will commit to measure and publish their food waste data within the next year.
Tesco published food waste figures for its Republic of Ireland and Central European operations for the first time last year, and the retailer claims that it is “70% of the way towards its target that no food, safe for human consumption, goes to waste.”
According to the statement, Lewis will say: “Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste. That’s the equivalent of 1.3 billion tonnes of food being thrown away and we think that’s simply not right.
“We hope every country, major city and company involved in the food supply chain publishes their own food waste data, so that together we can take targeted action to reduce waste.
“We believe that what gets measured gets managed. Ultimately, the only way to tackle food waste is to understand the challenge – to know where in the supply chain food is wasted.”
Champions 12.3 is a coalition of executives from governments, businesses and international organisations which aims to halve global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030.
North Carolina’s Hog And Poultry Farmers Are Directly In The Path of Hurricane Florence. Are They Ready?
Previous storms prompted manure-related environmental disasters. This week, North Carolina could get very smelly.
September 11th, 2018
by H. Claire Brown
As of Tuesday afternoon, more than a million people are under mandatory evacuation orders in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina as Hurricane Florence draws closer to the coast. Meteorologists are predicting that the Carolina coasts will start seeing tropical storm-force winds late Wednesday night, with hurricane-force winds arriving at around noon on Thursday and official landfall likely on Thursday night. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency on Friday.
The governor also lifted restrictions on weight-limited vehicles like semi-trucks so that farmers could harvest crops ahead of the storm. Heather Overton, assistant director of public affairs at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, says the agency sent 12 regional agronomists to survey farmers around the state. They estimate about two-thirds of the state’s tobacco and three-quarters of the corn have already been harvested, but sweet potato and peanut harvests are just getting underway.
“Farmers are working to get as much out of the fields as they can,” Overton says. “We urge them and everybody else to take the situation seriously.”
Hog and poultry farmers have more to worry about than flooded barns.
Meanwhile, the state’s pork and poultry farmers are stocking up on feed and fuel and moving animals to higher ground. “Some of the farms will have sent their birds to the processing plant a little early to move them off the farm,” says Bob Ford, executive director of the North Carolina Poultry Federation. “We’re in pretty good shape,” he adds. The pork industry seems similarly nonchalant: Andy Curliss, the North Carolina Pork Council CEO told Bloomberg he’d only be concerned if the state got more than 25 inches of rain.
In reality, hog and poultry farmers have more to worry about than flooded barns. Animal agriculture produces about 10 billion pounds of wet waste a year in North Carolina, and a lot of that waste is stored in open lagoons. During Hurricane Floyd in 1999, those lagoons broke open and dumped waste into public waters, an environmental catastrophe that was later blamed for algal blooms and fish kills. During Hurricane Matthew in 2016, 14 lagoons flooded and millions of animals died. Yet in a blog post admonishing readers to “beware of misleading narratives and check facts,” the North Carolina Pork Council argued that the vast majority of lagoons operated as advertised during Matthew, which minimized the damage.
Overton says North Carolina hog farmers have begun spraying manure onto fields to free up space in the lagoons should major rainfall accompany Florence. Transferring waste from the pit to the field helps minimize the risk of a flooded lagoon, but the state’s Department of Environmental Quality regulates the amount of manure farmers are allowed to apply. Overton says that farmers have had several days to prepare. “From what we understand, they are in pretty good shape.”
North Carolina doesn’t always know where poultry farms are located.
Farmers are required to stop applying manure at a certain point after weather watches and warnings are issued by the National Weather Service—typically hours before the severe weather begins. This can put them in a double-bind: leave the manure in the lagoons and risk a breach caused by flooding, or break the law by applying it on the farm too late and risk letting it run off into the public water supply when the storm comes. There’s a powerful incentive to break the rules.
“We have consistently, in advance of similar storms even of lesser intensity, witnessed illegal spraying after that prohibition is triggered,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group. “That’s part of what we will be on the lookout for during our pre-storm monitoring.”
Hendrick’s team will also be monitoring agricultural flooding from the air so that it can alert state agencies to mobilize a response. He points out that the state of North Carolina doesn’t always know where poultry farms are located—they’re not required to apply for a permit.
“I don’t think anyone is as optimistic as to assume that there won’t be considerable damage in North Carolina,” Hendrick says. “We’re going to do our best to determine it, assess it—and in particular, the damage that’s caused by threats to water quality.”
ENVIRONMENT, FARM, HOME FEATURE, SYSTEMS,CAFO DISASTER PREPAREDNESS HURRICANE FLORENCE NATURAL DISASTERS NORTH CAROLINA
NatureFresh™ Farms Partners With Forgotten Harvest To Reduce Food Waste Footprint
Leamington, ON (August 30th, 2018) – In an organized effort to reduce their food waste footprint, NatureFresh™ Farms has partnered with Forgotten Harvest, a perishable food rescue, and redistribution organization, to deliver nutritious food to people in need. So far in 2018 2018, NatureFresh™ Farms has successfully donated over 150,000 pounds of produce to the Forgotten Harvest program.
The issue of food waste, both at the commercial and consumer level, is beginning to gain more recognition as a serious global problem. Every year, roughly 1.3 billion tons of food gets thrown out globally, and this food ends up in landfills where it is not used and begins to emit greenhouse gases (primarily methane). As food wastage becomes a more recognized problem, consumers and businesses in the food industry are improving their efforts to curb the issue of food waste.
The NatureFresh™ Farms team has made a firm commitment to consistently collecting and donating greenhouse-grown products that cannot be sold at the retail level but are still nutritious and fully edible, to Forgotten Harvest. The food rescue organization then gleans and repackages the produce into family-friendly sizes that are redistributed within their network of food banks.
Justin Guenther, the Allocation/Shipping Manager at NatureFresh™ Farms, has been a driving force for this program’s development: “The initial creation of this donation program saw some obstacles, as every new program does, but once people started to realize how much food we were saving, it really opened their eyes to the good we could do as a company.” In 2018, NatureFresh™ Farms is projecting that they will reallocate roughly 600,000 pounds of produce to feed food insecure families through Forgotten Harvest’s food bank network.
NatureFresh™ Farms has been donating produce to Forgotten Harvest since 2011, but the food rescue organization has been feeding members of the metro-Detroit area since 1990. With 35 tracks, over 16,000 annual volunteers, and a massive local and international network, Forgotten Harvest is committed to providing food insecure families with fresh, nutritious food as quickly as possible. Chris Ivey, Director of Marketing & Public Relations at Forgotten Harvest, cites the importance of their partnership with NatureFresh™ Farms: “As metro Detroit’s only fresh food rescue, our partnership with NatureFresh™ is a critical portion of our supply chain. Because of these efforts, Forgotten Harvest can deliver on the promise of providing a fresh nutritious mix of food, delivered free of charge, to the over 250 partner agencies we support in our community.”
Forgotten Harvest’s mission to provide people with access to essential foods is a mission that Peter Quiring, the Founder and CEO of NatureFresh™ Farms, also champions: “Working with an organization like Forgotten Harvest, as well as many other community food banks, means that our company can help even more people live healthier lives. To build strong communities, it’s essential to work hand in hand with like-minded organizations.”
In addition to their work with Forgotten Harvest, NatureFresh™ Farms constantly seeks to engage with local food banks and food rescue organizations, including Southwestern Ontario Gleaners.
Kara Badder
Marketing Project Manager