Featured Project: Food Alliance - Sustainable Agriculture
Ecoworks Foundation is partnering with Food Alliance, a national non-profit organization offering sustainability certification for farms, ranches and food handlers, to create a newly scalable set of certification standards to allow for more rapid growth of Food Alliance programs.
Launched in 1998, Food Alliance currently certifies over 270 farms and ranches in 18 states, with standards covering beef, lamb, pork, dairy products, nuts, mushrooms, wheat and other grains, and a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Benefits from certification reported by farmers and ranchers include positive customer feedback, increased customer loyalty, sales increases, new markets, and access to contracts and price premiums.
Currently, certification standards developed by Food Alliance are practice-based and are both crop and region-specific. This means that each crop requires a separate standard that addresses conditions and pest management practices for each region in which it is grown. As an example, Food Alliance has separate standards for apples grown in the Northwest, the Midwest and the Northwest. Food Alliance is continually challenged to adapt existing standards to new regions or to develop new standards for additional crops. The significant time and monetary cost required to continually develop and adjust standards severely limits Food Alliance's certification program growth.
With Ecoworks Foundation assistance, new standards will be developed that use an outcomes-based approach, rather than the current practice-based standards. This would allow Food Alliance to define desirable environmental outcomes for major cropping systems - raw crops, orchards, livestock, etc. - and create standards that could be applied with any crop in any region of the country. Food Alliance will engage researchers at Oregon State University, Washington State University, and other institutions and agencies when developing these new standards over the next two years.
Upon completion, Food Alliance will be able to rapidly expand its certification program nationwide. Over the next four years, Food Alliance's goal is to certify over 1000 additional farms and ranches, bringing as many as 15 million additional acres under proactive management for toxics reduction, soil and water conservation, wildlife habitat protection, and other issues addressed under the certification standards.
Ecoworks Foundation is proud to join with Food Alliance to promote Sustainable Agriculture practices and expansion of certification programs on a regional and national scale.