ASH CLOUD

Consumers will pay a premium for climate-friendly red meat, but not the way you’re thinking about it. This premium is not a mark-up on any single purchase. It’s customer loyalty to the retailer selling the product. A brand with integrity keeps customers coming back, and the retailer, the real customer, captures that lifetime value. Today I am joined by Tom Sturgess, who has been involved in red meat production since 1985. Thirty years ago he moved to New Zealand and taught himself sheep and b...

Rice feeds more people than any other crop, and it is grown in a way that is quietly expensive. Globally, a third of all groundwater extraction goes to rice farming. And because those fields sit flooded for weeks at a time, the resulting anaerobic conditions produce methane. Rice accounts for around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to the aviation industry, and about 12% of all methane. In India, rice covers some 40 million hectares, a quarter of the country's agricultural la...

Managing and mitigating risk runs through my whole conversation with Robert Bonnie. Since the Dust Bowl, USDA policy, the Farm Bill and especially crop insurance have given US farmers a safety net that shares the risk of growing the nation's food. But farming keeps getting riskier. Climate change, volatile input costs and commodity prices, access to labour, access to markets and geopolitical instability are all shifting more than they used to. Too often farmers and ranchers are left to carry ...

Beef sustainability frequently gets framed as something imposed on the ranchers and the industry from outside—regulatory requirements, consumer pressure, climate obligations driven by environmental groups and activists, leaving the industry industry to respond or resist. But this frame misses something fundamental. My guest today, Tom McDonald, is chair of the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and sustainability lead at Five Rivers Cattle. His reframing is powerful because it turns sustain...

The beef industry has spent decades optimizing feed efficiency in one place: the feedlot. Genetics have been selected for finishing performance, cattle are placed on feed at lighter weights and fed to heavier carcasses, and the result is measurable improvement in how much feed converts to pounds of beef. Al Rotz's 50-year life cycle assessment comparing 1972 to 2022 documents this clearly—the industry has made tremendous progress. But this optimization has created a misalignment: the most pro...