Who carries the cost when a supply chain makes an environmental claim?

A claim about environmental performance made at the top of a supply chain depends on figures that start on farms, which means the question of who carries the cost of supporting it reaches back to producers. Ruminati was at the IFPA Produce Exec Program in Geelong last week, a produce and horticulture program and not an emissions event, with people thinking about the future of their businesses and supply chains. The question came up in different forms across several sessions.

The investment version came from Jenna Lindbeck of Roc Partners, who described the businesses worth backing as the ones where environmental performance is built into how the business runs. When the things that reduce a footprint also improve margins, the return stops being something that has to be argued for. The same holds on a farm, where emissions intensity moves with the decisions a producer already weighs for profitability.

Belinda Wilson raised a related point about horticulture, which is that Australian producers are already doing a lot of the work and much of the gap lies in the systems that let them show it. That gap is where the cost sits, because many businesses are still building the data behind their claims. In the meantime the work of supporting them can settle on producers as indirect market access pressure, with the same details about a farm written out each time another business asks.

Evidence for a claim about sourcing or labelling starts as the records a producer keeps on the property, so the cost of supporting it is carried there from the first request. That cost can be shared, and insetting programs that recognise measurable emissions reductions are starting to take shape, although they are still early in Australian agriculture and depend on farm-level figures that can be checked. A practical check for any program is whether the producer sees their own figures and a return that justifies the effort, and whether the business can show where its figures came from.

Ruminati is built around making the work producers already do legible to the businesses that need to see it, without adding to their reporting load. The data stays with the producer, who chooses which organisations see it, and with their permission results can be brought together across the producers a business works with. If that is a conversation your business would like to have, the team is at hello@ruminati.com.au.