The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) announced last week its mutual membership and partnership with the Potato Sustainability Initiative (PSI) to align metrics in measuring sustainability issues throughout the potato supply chain. TSC and PSI will work together to align sustainability metrics for over 500 potato growers and key retail partners. This partnership will also help streamline reporting by potato growers to retailers by working together to align metrics between PSI and TSC. PSI will join several agriculture initiatives TSC currently has in place to align metrics from farms to manufacturers to retailers.
“TSC is very pleased to announce our partnership with PSI,” says Christy Melhart Slay, director of research at TSC. “PSI and TSC have created metrics for potatoes, and we look forward to working together on alignment between our tools. Potato growers have been some of the first to create and adopt sustainability metrics. We look forward to learning from this progressive initiative.”
“The growers, processors and customers participating in the Potato Sustainability Initiative welcome our agreement with The Sustainability Consortium,” says Eric Ritchie, senior manager of agriculture for North American farm assurance and policy at McCain Foods, and chair of the Potato Sustainability Governance Committee. “The collaboration provides an opportunity to share information and expertise, align performance measures, and help make the process of continually improving the sustainability of potato production more efficient for everyone.”
PSI is the leading program in North America for growers producing potatoes for the processing market, with more than 500 potato growers participating, along with six major processors, key buyers including McDonald’s and Sysco, and the National Potato Council and Canadian Horticultural Council. Potato processors Basic American Foods, Cavendish Farms, Heinz, Lamb Weston, McCain Foods and Simplot fund the collaboration, which includes an annual grower survey that reports on key performance measures including integrated pest management, nutrient and irrigation use efficiency, energy use, recycling and reuse, and periodic on-farm audits.
“Potato growers have a long history of identifying and pursuing opportunities to improve production practices,” says John Keeling, executive vice president and CEO of the National Potato Council. “The Potato Sustainability Initiative’s agreement with The Sustainability Consortium represents a continuation of our focus on great-quality potatoes and real progress on sustainability. It also recognizes the tremendous amount of time and effort potato growers are investing to continue to improve the sustainability of their farms.”
Source: The Sustainability Consortium