Company : Ben&Jerry's (Unilever)
Groups : 2 Farmer coops, CONO (NL) & St. Albans Cooperative (US); WWF (NL), the Society for Nature and Environment and Solidaridad (NL), Manomet Center for Conservation Science (USA)
Initiated in the US
in 2002, the Caring Dairy program began as a research project between Ben & Jerry’s and the University of Michigan. The program then expanded into a five year pilot project from 2003-2008 aimed to assess whether the program would add value to dairy farmers and would address the new and developing concept of sustainable agriculture. Upon successful completion of the trial, in 2010 the program expanded into collaborative initiative with the St. Albans Cooperative. In parallel, Ben & Jerry’s quickly expanded Caring Dairy into Europe. In 2007 Ben & Jerry’s NL started working with CONO Cheesemakers - a Dutch cheese maker who has since rolled out the Caring Dairy program to almost 500 dairy farmers.
Caring Dairy enables farmers to evaluate their farms again a comprehensive set of key criteria or “sustainability Indicators”:
- Soil fertility and health,
- Soil loss,
- Nutrients,
- Pest management,
- Biodiversity,
- Farm Economics,
- Energy,
- Water,
- Social Human Capital,
- Impact on Local Economy and
- Animal Husbandry/Welfare
Caring Dairy in both the US and NL have similar goals, however, we do acknowledges cultural and agricultural differences between the two countries.
Mutual Goals:
- Support sustainable & safe methods of food production;
- Educate consumers on the importance of sustainable sourcing/dairy farming;
- Create a “sustainable dairy farming standard”;
- Provide collective leadership in the dairy industry through our partnership with dairy producers;
- Provide an easy to use, value-added program;
- Incentivize farmer participation through an annual premium
Process:
- Integrated approach: What the program defines as “Happy cows, Happy Farmers and Happy planet” results is a woven fabric of sustainability.
- Continuous improvement: Through the development of a baseline, targeted workshops and annual improvement plans, there is an on-going journey towards a more sustainable dairy farm.
- Bottom-up approach: Farmers are involved in the project development and annual feedback.
- Knowledge based: Workshops are organized based on various factors; farmer interests, results of the baseline assessment and current issues. Farmers are provided support in these areas through outside resources.
In the US we will step back and assess the project in 2017, evaluate what we measured and how we measured it and then determine if we will continue as is or modify the program or in fact identify a new avenue to engage with our farmers. In the Netherlands our successful integration with CONO has allowed us to keep moving in a fluid method which lends itself to on-going change and evaluation. In both cases we are committed to supporting sustainable dairy farming.