ESG Goals for Agriculture by Deborah Wilson, Chief Industry Engagement Officer, TrustBIX Inc. ESG ~ acronym for Environmental, Social & (Corporate) Governance Why We Need to Connect Data Dots and Fill in Information Gaps Along the Cattle and Beef Supply Chains Recently, Kawasaki Heavy Industries claimed1 that it aims to achieve carbon neutrality in its domestic factories in 2030. They’re planning to build a hydrogen-fueled power plant that will provide electricity to its factories. Wonder why I’m talking about a Japanese heavy-equipment company? Because their plan is not just to bring down emissions at domestic sites. Their overarching goal is to show everyone a workable and affordable way to carbon neutrality. The fact that companies, representing various industries including fast moving consumer goods companies like food retailers across the world, have committed to reducing emissions and changing the way they have been running businesses for decades. This means that mitigating climate change and supporting the environment by actions is not only a responsibility of environmental activists and scientists anymore. Contributing to decarbonization and global energy transition is something business owners should keep in mind, whether they run a multi-national or national business, a retail store or a small local business, a farm, a feedlot or a processing plant. Lets’ look at three agri-food pillars of a green future: reducing energy use, understanding carbon storage potential, and turning organic waste into biochar for soil amendments and feed additives.
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Angus World
Rethinking Energy Use: Good for the Environment and Your Bank Account “How much are you paying for electricity? Our bills are ridiculous! We have the TV on all the time, and I keep forgetting to turn the lights off. Maybe switching to LED bulbs would help?” How many times have you had a conversation like this with your friends and family? When it comes to our households, it’s quite easy to find relevant information about how much energy is used on average and even easier to discover dozens of ways to reduce energy use. But if you want to get the same data about businesses in a particular industry, it becomes a real challenge, especially for those who manage farms and ranches. There is not enough agricultural energy use data available, and each case is unique since energy use depends on multiple factors from location, to size, to facilities, to average temperature throughout the year. What stays the same is that reducing energy consumption is vital to the future of agriculture and agri-food, not to mention the benefit of a cost savings to those operations gathering the data. It’s the old adage of “you can’t change what you don’t measure”. How about a 20-30% decrease in operational energy costs? Is that of interest? If so, read on…. With the right tools that let you measure, analyze, and optimize energy use, it’s possible. TrustBIX is proud to be a partner with BuildSense and
Commercial Edition 2022 *
introduce AgSense – a software that allows you to analyze and benchmark your operation’s energy use and emissions against your industry peers and quickly see what processes can be improved. This will not only affect your bottom line in a positive way but also help verify and measure your ESG values, which is necessary across supply chains in the 21st century. You will also contribute to data that can be anonymized and aggregated to show a true indication of energy used in our agriculture and agri-food operations, creating some valuable benchmarks in the ag industry that don’t exist today. Interestingly, they do exist in most other industries. Focusing on Carbon Storage Potential Carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities operate in numerous locations worldwide, from Norway to Brazil, from Canada to Australia. Currently, the largest operational CCS facility in the world is in the US and has a storage capacity of seven million metric tons per year. Here, in Canada, we have CCS projects of the same prominence. The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) is the world’s newest large-scale carbon capture, utilization and storage system. It captures industrial emissions and delivers the CO₂ to oil and gas reservoirs. Imagine capturing CO₂ from more than 3 million cars – that’s how much CO₂ ACTL can transport every year. It’s fair to say that the future of lower-carbon economies relies on such infrastructure elements as the ACTL system,
