The Scoop Podcast: Sustainability Requires Playing Good Offense
Allison Nepveux, Director of Sustainability at Bushel, details the intersection of technology and supply chains in agriculture and how it’s opening opportunities for grain elevators and farmers in digitizing their business.
What is sustainability; what is traceability?
It's important to note sustainability isn't just carbon. Carbon is all the buzz right now in sustainability.
I think of it as like an entire pizza. If someone's put a pizza in front of you, sustainability is the whole pie– its economic its social its environmental which is where we spend a lot of time.
And when it comes to your traceability I really try to think about it more as transparency. So how do we bring visibility into those sustainability practices whatever they might be. And how do we help use those quality metrics or the story about where that food is coming from, to help our facilities minimize risk, maximize opportunities. So that's really kind of the focus of our work is thinking about that entire piece of pizza, and then what are the tools that our facilities need to start taking little nibbles wherever it makes sense for them.
What are the obstacles in connecting on-farm data and into the supply chain?
Bushel’s really well primed in this space because we are the first point of sale. So a producer drops off their grain, and we are the first kind of digital record of that grain entering the system. We can take a step backwards to the farm or forward to the next step in the supply chain. Where that becomes a challenge is that everyone enters their data in a completely different way.
We have spent a lot of time really thinking about how do we standardize that data, how do we normalize that data, how does it flow between systems. That is really our role to just be that partner to help connect the dots. But it's easier to connect the dots when the data looks the same in all these different silos and traditionally in ag that hasn't been the case–everything has been very, very separate and not as easy to talk to each other.
What is the role of the grain elevator in these efforts?
When we go back to that pizza–everything that is sustainability–every grain facility is starting to nibble on that pizza in a different place. They're starting from different efforts; they're thinking about sustainability in different ways; so their role looks very different depending on where they are in that journey. For some facilities that role is about maintaining access to overseas markets, and that's where I spent you know a lot of time prior to coming to Bushel. So how do we build tools that, think about the mass volume approach the mass balance approach so that we can share a story without really thinking about premiums and without separating things in the system. There are a lot of facilities that are in that space.
We're also seeing a lot of facilities that you know are responsible for maintaining access to downstream CPG companies, and that is starting to look like that focus on carbon. So how do we track the entire carbon emissions within a supply chain. And a grain facility might be responsible for thinking about you know what are my producers doing on farm, how do we connect that to what's being delivered and then report that to whichever CPG company we sell to.
It really depends on who the grain facility is and where they're getting the most pressure right now as to what their role looks like and how they're responding.
Cybersecurity, data security are top topics, and how should farmers be thinking about this as they digitize their business?
It's a huge challenge for the industry as a whole and our focus most of the time is really at that grain facility where we have oftentimes pre-Bushels and pre a lot of these technologies really archaic systems. So we have a lot of brilliant people at Bushel that focus on us every day– how do we make sure that we're preventing we're monitoring we're detecting or reacting to those issues, and that we don't have, you know, the cybersecurity threats.
Another layer of this from the farm side is, maybe less so, just in breaches and security but understanding ownership of farmer data, understanding what you're sharing how you're sharing. We spend a lot of time on data privacy of the farmer and I think paying attention to that on-farm is probably just as important.
What part of sustainability is often misunderstood or carries the most misconceptions?
Right now I think that it's that misconception that sustainability is carbon and carbon is sustainability. There is a lot of buzz around that topic. And that's great. I think that will be probably one of the first big areas that we're able to unlock and to monetize. But sustainability is bigger than just carbon, it's also bigger than just the environmental piece, which is why you see so much focus and attention on the economic side of things. And so I see that as an obvious misconception–people kind of equating one small slice of something to the entire thing.
What are the greatest advantages in pushing forward sustainability via the Bushel route?
We are the digital partner. The big advantage of being agnostic is that wherever a facility wants to go or wherever they want to focus, wherever their farmers want to play, we are responsible for kind of connecting those tools collaborating with other partners, and that's our role in being agnostic. We can play with any number of people that are focused on any number of different areas and expertise and that's how I think we have evolved as an ag tech community. There are very few of us out there that are trying to own the entire end to end something but instead specializing on what we do best and at Bushel what we do best is kind of making those connections and we can do that because we're agnostic.
