Mary Jane Melendez Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Officer,  General Mills

Our Director Erin Callahan caught up with Mary Jane Melendez from General Mills about their regenerative agriculture work and their plans for the future! Read their conversation below.

Nutiva was one of the first companies to join the Climate Collaborative in 2017 and has made five climate action commitments, to: Regenerative Agriculture, Energy Efficiency, Food Waste, Packaging, and Transportation. They are also a champion-level donor, helping catalyze action and resource provision to our network of 660 companies. We sat down with them to check in on their climate action, detailed in their new 2019 Impact Report.

You can download a version of this case study here.

The Power of Carbon Farming to Mitigate Climate Change

Agriculture accounts for 15% of global emissions, and carbon farming practices such as composting, cover cropping, and rotational grazing have significant potential to start reversing that number. Project Drawdown has shown that carbon farming or regenerative agriculture practices are the 11^th most powerful tool in humanity’s tool kit to mitigate global warming.

As of this writing, 151 companies have committed to implement these practices through the Climate Collaborative. Many of those companies are struggling with how to engage farmers in their supply chains to begin a shift toward adopting carbon building practices. This is, in part, because while the climate case is clear, the business case is still being developed.

Straus Family Creamery— a pioneer in carbon farming and many other sustainable practices— set out to change that. Straus has started to build an unprecedented financial case for carbon farming and ranchland management.

You can download a version of this case study here.

The Climate Potential of Food Waste Reduction

A third of all food produced globally goes to waste, accounting for 4.4 gigatonnes of GHG emissions. If food waste were its own country, it would rank third-highest in emissions of all the countries on Earth![1]

Food waste emissions are created through the process of growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food, then transporting it again to its final resting place—the landfill—where it rots, creating more GHG emissions. Food waste also represents a tremendous waste of resources including water, cropland, fuel, fertilizer and human labor, making it not only terrible for the environment but also a significant financial loss for brands, retailers and consumers!

Situated between producers, distributors and consumers, retailers have a unique potential to impact emissions both upstream and down, by working with all of these parties to minimize food loss and waste. BriarPatch Food Co-op, a community-owned business in Grass Valley, California, has pioneered a successful effort to minimize waste at the source by working with local producers.

Up to 1/3 of global greenhouse gas emissions stems from the food system, an estimated 80% of which comes from agriculture.[1] Nearly 200 companies in our community are working to reduce their agricultural footprint through carbon farming practices. Among them, CC committee company General Mills is going one step further to create an open-source self-assessment tool for any farmer to use to identify and boost their regenerative agricultural practices.

In April 2018, Climate Collaborative committed company Danone North America became the largest company in the world to earn B Corp™ Certification. The company has made commitments to agriculture, energy efficiency, food waste, forests, packaging, policy engagement, and transportation through the Climate Collaborative.

As part of our ROOTED Community, the Climate Collaborative and committed companies work each month to explore ways to improve farmer training practices, methods for quantifying carbon soil sequestration, and how to market these activities to consumers and other stakeholders. For information on how to join, email info@climatecollaborative.com.