Nov 16, 2021Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops tracks sustainability
Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops announced Nov. 16 a partnership with CropTrak, a cloud technology company digitally connecting global food companies’ supply processes to ensure efficiency and transparency, to accelerate adoption of the Stewardship Calculator 2.0 across the specialty food supply chain.
The partnership leverages CropTrak’s technology and on the ground expertise with growers to deepen the level of insight and improve user experience of the tool. This empowers participants across the supply chain to baseline the environmental impacts of fruit, nut and vegetable production and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops (SISC) is a multi-stakeholder initiative with growers, grower groups, brands, buyers and NGOs dedicated to developing tools for measuring on-farm sustainability performance across the specialty crop supply chain.
“As the industry responds to climate change and shifting consumer demand, our partners asked for a credible, easy-to-use data solution to track stewardship practices from farm to fork,” Alison Edwards, SISC director, said in a news release. “Thanks to CropTrak’s generous partnership, we had the opportunity to leverage their industry leading platform and deep supply chain data insights to update key metrics and implement more efficient workflows to help accelerate adoption by growers and their supply chain partners.”
The Stewardship Calculator 2.0 can be used to track on-farm water, energy/GHG, fertilizer use efficiency and soil organic matter, as well as biodiversity, food waste and irrigation efficiency. These SISC metrics help inform sustainability reporting as well as to improve production plans and supply chain management practices.
“Sustainability metrics are a critical part of the overall food story. CropTrak helps global food companies solve complex supply challenges through data collection and analytics every day. CropTrak’s team of engineers and data scientists are proud to support SISC and create a tool that can be used to deepen the trust and communications between growers, companies and consumers,” said Aaron Hutchinson, president of CropTrak.
Based on input from growers, environmental NGOs and buyers, SISC metrics exist to provide a single third-party validator to sustainability metrics that can be communicated transparently among peer groups and supply chain partners.
Edwards added, “This tool demonstrates steps we are taking to ensure we meet our commitment to advance environmental, social and economic sustainability of the specialty crop supply chain.”
Stewardship Calculator 2.0 information will be available at the Sustainable Agriculture Summit, which brings together growers, processors, retailers, academia and conservation organizations to forge and strengthen cross-sector partnership for a more sustainability food supply.
SISC is a partner host this event. Interested parties should visit the SISC & CropTrak booth on the exhibit floor. About Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops (SISC) is a multi-stakeholder initiative dedicated to developing tools for measuring sustainable performance across specialty crop (all fruit, nut and vegetable) supply chains.
The project is an unprecedented collaboration amongst the nation’s most influential grower organizations, non-governmental organizations and buyers of specialty crop products. SISC offers a suite of outcomes-focused metrics enabling operators to benchmark, compare and communicate their own performance. www.stewardshipindex.org
More information is available here.
