Big food corporations are funding cover crops across the Midwest — on their own terms.
This Perspective piece does not represent the views of Offrange or Ambrook, its parent company.
Forty minutes into an Agri-Pulse panel titled Scaling Sustainable Supply Chains, I began to notice that both “scale” and “sustainability” were remarkably flexible terms. The conference room in downtown Washington, D.C., bustled with journalists, farmers, interested citizens, and policy wonks, clustered around tables like pale lily pads. On stage sat a vice president of global public policy from a major food company, alongside a representative from the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund (SWOF), a grant-issuing organization affiliated with the Iowa Soybean Association, and two Iowa corn and soybean farmers.
Agri-Pulse had brought them all together to discuss a set of recent corporate conservation initiatives. The food and beverage company has been investing in direct payments to its farmers for planting cover crops through SWOF, as one of the fund’s largest corporate partners. Midwestern growers can apply to receive $30−$40 per acre annually. Half the money is offered up front, and the rest is paid after an inspection the following year, to ensure that cover crops were actually planted. This program dominated the panel’s discussion, though they applied many variations to the theme: Why should farmers work with corporate sustainability initiatives? Why not other programs? What advantages do private-sector partnerships offer?
To be fair, these initiatives do deserve some plaudits. Cover crops such as rye or oats are crucial for reducing erosion and improving soil health. It’s hard to dispute the immediate benefits of the SWOF framework, which lets companies pay to protect their own supply chain and bottom line, while also reducing the up-front cost for farmers, many of whom may be reluctant to invest in conservation practices that don’t yield profits for several years. At the same time, however, a faint sense of unease nagged at me. We were ostensibly here for a discussion of sustainability, after all; yet almost an hour into the panel, climate change and greenhouse gases had not even been mentioned.
The dangers of more severe droughts, storms, and more volatile seasons for farmers’ lives and livelihoods are hard to overstate, as Offrange has reported. Because of this, understanding the complex relationship between agriculture and climate change is critical to making our food industry less extractive and more resilient. But when the Agri-Pulse panel did finally allude to climate impacts, it was only to deride the arbitrary emission standards of “the carbon gods.” The panel closed by asking each member where they expected the future of agriculture to lead, with a pointed reminder to keep the tone hopeful. One of the Iowa farmers replied that he’s heartened that bleak environmental headlines today are unchanged from those of 60 years ago, yet “we’re still here.” As he saw it, “the future is as bright as you want it to be.”
This was embodied most poignantly in the mantra of the day, repeated more times than I could count: Scaling Sustainability.
It’s quite a claim in an era when billions of people are threatened by climate change and fossil fuel pollution, but it is also, in a way, hardly surprising. Corporations have strong incentives to support conservation techniques up to the point that they measurably boost returns, and to treat any more ambitious approach — particularly government regulation — as a threat.
But overt opposition risks public backlash, as two-thirds of Americans believe corporations are doing too little to reduce emissions. Instead, some companies display enthusiastic support to gain credibility in these discussions — as fossil fuel companies have at UN climate summits. Shifts in the food industry to embrace emission accounting efforts have likewise been criticized for potential greenwashing.
All of this was embodied most poignantly in the mantra of the day, repeated more times than I could count: Scaling Sustainability. The two words certainly sound exciting, but each of them was gradually whittled down over the course of the event. “Sustainability” came to include only those projects and programs that coincide with corporate profitability. The nearer the financial dividends, the more sustainable a given investment was judged to be. Never mind such nebulous notions as a common good.
The approach to “scale” was similarly striking. The panel portrayed government action, both regulatory and incentive-based, as being too large and clunky, too top-down and one-size-fits-all. Simultaneously, however, it was taken as a given that conservation solutions are only worthwhile if they can be implemented on the order of millions of acres, ruling out most individual or community-based efforts by default. The only survivors, occupying the tenuous Goldilocks Zone between ‘too huge’ and ‘too local,’ were corporate programs.
These terminological shifts underlie and complicate the plainly positive impacts of SWOF’s corporate cover crop investments. If we don’t intentionally reckon with the causes, we all risk following suit unconsciously. On one hand, when such programs exceed empty commitments, they can be remarkably effective. Researchers at NYU have found that profit motives alone can sometimes lead large firms to make significant climate investments, which in turn guide the market and policymakers to offer more of those incentives.
Any company has strong incentives to support conservation techniques up to the point that they measurably boost its returns, and to treat any more ambitious approach as an existential threat.
But to treat corporate partnerships as the only effective form of disaster mitigation and sustainability — as was the decided tone of the Agri-Pulse event — is to abandon any of the countless vital efforts that fall outside the margins of a given company’s demonstrable profitability. The same NYU research showed that much private environmental action depends on enacting carbon tax policy, for instance. Once again, corporations are incentivized to ensure that we over-rely on their voluntary actions; hence their portrayal of government programs as clumsy and outdated, and of local and community conservation efforts as doomed from the start.
To get a broader perspective on what “scaling sustainability” could mean instead, I spoke with Neil Gormley, founder and executive director of Wild Potomac, a Maryland non-profit. They work to restore the Potomac River’s watershed through volunteer tree-plantings, stream cleanups, and exchanges of sustainable produce that “build a bioregional gift economy.” Gormley firmly disagreed with the premise that effective work at scale has to come at the expense of a hyper-local focus.
On the contrary, he argued that bureaucratic and larger programs are often forced to ignore meaningful features of each ecosystem they manage. “You’re going to be focusing on just a few metrics,” Gormley said, “and you’re going to be leaving a lot out.” By grounding his work locally, on the other hand, he aims to “engage with an ecosystem as the complex being that it is.” That doesn’t mean giving up on national impacts. In fact, Gormley agreed with the importance of scalability, but he added an important twist for work at an ecosystem or watershed level: “Those solutions can scale in a different sense … They have to scale fractally.”
A fractal pattern, like the branching of a tree or river, repeats smaller structures as it grows and becomes more complex. In other words, Gormley wants local conservation projects to increase their impact by inspiration and iteration rather than simply becoming larger themselves.
One way a project might “scale fractally” is to be widely implemented across state or county governments. Even if the funds are federal, this allows each instance to be specialized for its region. On my own family’s farm, for example, we’ve planted trees through Maryland’s Healthy Soils Competitive Fund, a grant program with a striking resemblance to corporate investments through SWOF. Notably, however, it lacks the latter’s profit-driven incentives to obstruct more ambitious conservation work. As a government program, it is designed to serve the general public, unlike a company’s sole commitment to its financial shareholders.
What is it that we want to sustain? The answers will look different for every person, every year, on every plot of land.
I also met with The Land Institute, a nonprofit focused on developing and promoting perennial grains for regenerative agriculture. Their work offers another alternative model of scalability alongside corporate support. Tammy Kimbler, their chief communications officer, and Jen Mayer, director of crop stewardship, agreed that “scaling sustainability” is an important aspiration. In fact, the Land Institute’s website includes a page on precisely that. But both Mayer and Kimbler echoed Gormley’s point about what scale really means. Kimbler emphasized “local specialization,” rather than top-down funding and enforcement.
They also cited General Mills’ support of Kernza, a perennial grain created by The Land Institute, as emblematic of the way that corporate funds can be used with less risk of creating perverse incentives. There are many obstacles to the widespread adoption of Kernza and other new grains. Yet their non-profit inception and potential for boosting soil health and resilience highlight what was all but overlooked at the Agri-Pulse conference: that private-sector programs alone cannot possibly address our climate and sustainability crises. Rather, we should recognize the benefits of resources like corporate funding of cover crop funds, and insist on comprehensive government action, and support local conservation in agriculture — all while being wary of any attempt to narrow the scope of these solutions. As Mayer put it, “It can be a trap to think of one approach as achieving scale.”
As climate change continues to outpace predictions, farmers must somehow prepare for harsher conditions, reduce their own emissions, and protect their land, all while continuing to turn a profit in harsh economic straits. Corporate funds can be extremely useful in that transition, as the SWOF-backed cover crop initiative is. Yet by their very nature, companies will never have sufficient incentives to solve all of our ecological problems for us. Taking advantage of private programs should not mean ignoring the importance of many other avenues: governmental and non-profit, local and national, regulatory and grant-based. The Agri-Pulse panel illustrates how easy it can be to ignore the fundamental multiplicity of sustainability at scale.
During our conversation, Gormley asked a question that’s stuck with me: “What is it that we want to sustain?” For him, the answers are things that we can’t put a price tag on: clean air, beautiful natural spaces, accessible food, connection to the land, hope for a stable future — the unquantifiables that can fall through the cracks in larger programs, or even more troublingly, may be deliberately excluded from the definition of sustainability in the first place.
What is it that we want to sustain? The responses will vary for every person, every year, on every plot of land. But for multinational corporations, the answer will always be themselves.
