Dave Natzke
Published in Midwest Dairy Business (February 2008)
The buzzword at the International Dairy Foods Association’s Dairy Forum ’08 was “sustainability.” While the word gives everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling they’re doing something – anything – to make the world a better place to live, the definition of “sustainability” can be elusive and confusing. Many Dairy Forum speakers used the term to cover environmental and social aspects of milk and dairy product production, packaging and transportation.
While such goals are admirable and, like objects in our rearview mirror – closer than they appear – one of the messages I took home was that everyone needed to jump on the bandwagon, not only to be good global citizens, but also to capture the “value-added” premiums the marketplace is apparently willing to pay for a “sustainable” label.
Hey, I’m a capitalist, and if it ended there, great. But it doesn’t. While many find “sustainability” hard to define, they are sure they know it when they see it. Many of these same people want to impose their enlightened vision of “sustainability” on others. In many cases, the inconvenient truth is that the push for “sustainability” has more to do with market share than it does with being environmentally and socially conscious.
As I write this, there is an outgrowth of this dilemma. Under pressure to be more “sustainable,” several universities are in the “Catch-22” position of losing commercial markets – and much-needed funding from the sale of milk or crops – or give up researching approved technologies. Who wins there?
No doubt about it, we can all do better when it comes to caring for the present and future condition of our planet. But when it comes to “sustainability,” I left the Dairy Forum with some unanswered questions:
• Where does the balance of efficient, economic production – using available knowledge and applying technology to produce food in quantities to feed a world population rushing headlong toward 7 billion people – fit in our definition of “sustainability?”
• Isn’t that what modern agriculture is about – sustaining life in a responsible manner?
Speaking of questions, one of the fundamental questions of any geographically based industry is this: once weakened or lost, can it be regained? In my lifetime, that question has arisen in Detroit’s auto industry and across steel country – now the Rust Belt. It is also a question faced by the Midwest dairy industry in the 1990s, as investment, cows and young brilliant minds moved elsewhere. In some cases, dairy producers were unable to sustain against activists with a different vision of animal agriculture and the regional geography. That impact was probably felt nowhere more so than Minnesota.
Can the Midwest dairy industry be sustained and grow? That remains to be seen. Years ago, I probably would have said “no.” But as Minnesota Milk Producers Association executive director Bob Lefebvre details in the February 2008 issue of Midwest DairyBusiness (see “A change from within”), it takes more than changing downward spirals in cows and infrastructure, but also a change in mindset and leadership, before it’s too late. It’s happening in the Midwest.
We’re in a dairy era some say has a “triple bottom line” – economic, environmental and social. Whether for the sake of future food production, or the health of a regional dairy industry, the only sustainable “sustainability” is built on practicality; not on a single definition, and not in a rush for market share based on whatever social tail that is wagging the dog.
Posted with permission.