A Moving Target
For his efforts, Mr. Sutter has become the face of the sustainable soy program, opening his farm up to curious executives and reporters, and appearing in television ads for Hellmann’s. But he’s not really representative of farmers in the program.
In fact, Unilever doesn’t ask the farmers to change much at all. All that the program requires is that farmers pledge to become more ecologically sound and use the Field to Market software to share voluminous data about how they run their farms. The software then calculates things like the efficiency of water use, greenhouse gas emissions and soil carbon levels. These metrics are compared with benchmarks set by the United Soybean Board and endorsed by Unilever. As long as the farmer’s total practices meet some minimum thresholds, the crops are certified sustainable.
So far, Unilever and ADM aren’t even enforcing these rules. Even though little has changed on most of the soy farms in the Iowa program, Unilever counts their crops toward the 28 percent of soy it says is now “sustainable.”
Unilever says it is instead focused on enrolling farmers in the program, rather than holding them to high standards that they might not be able to meet.
“We aren’t telling them they’re not sustainable or kicking them out of the program,” said Clint Piper, the general manager for North American soybean processing at ADM. “Right now it’s about getting people in the program and sharing knowledge.”
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While Unilever performs random audits on participating farms, the loose criteria and absence of enforcement have left even some of those who created the program dissatisfied. Sarah Carlson, a researcher with Practical Farmers of Iowa, said that while things like fuel conservation and better irrigation were well and good, the real key to sustainable soy was the use of cover crops. Without cover crops, she said, “those soybeans are no more sustainable than anyone else’s soybeans.”
Not many of the farms meet Ms. Carlson’s definition of sustainability. Fewer than 75 farmers have received state subsidies to use cover crops, which amounts to less than a quarter of 1 percent of all the 40,000 soybean growers in Iowa.
The conflicting views about the soy program’s worthiness underscore one of the fundamental challenges of Unilever’s sustainable living plan: the word “sustainable.” Like “natural,” the word “sustainable” is sufficiently vague to mean quite a lot or nothing at all.