Sustainability, Continuous Improvement, and Cllimate Change

Have you ever pondered the definition of the terms "sustainability" or more recently, "continuous improvement"? Did you ever ask a farmer for the definition of these words?


I attended a conference on behalf of the National Pork Board's animal welfare committee in November of 2016 entitled "2016 Sustainable Agriculture Summit" in Atlanta Georgia.



Somewhere along the way the thought occurred to me, "Both Sustainability and Continuous Improvement have at their core definition the necessity of measurement".

If you are an astronaut and are planning a trip in space one of the first questions you will have is, "Is it sustainable?" "Can I live through it?" "Is there enough air on board?" All these questions require measurement to answer. How long (measurement) will the trip be? How much (measurement) air does a person require for that time? And what margin (measurement) of error should be considered  adequate.


Continuous Improvement is similar in nature. How do I know if I am improving? I will need to measure what I am doing now. That measurement will become a benchmark from which all others are measured to ascertain improvement.


Measurement is so central to these two concepts that it is practically a synonym. If the word "sustainability" is replaced with "measurement" not much is lost in the meaning of the sentence. For example, one of the sessions at the Sustainable Agriculture Summit was titled "Implementing a Sustainable Framework in the Pork Supply Chain". This can also be written "Implementing a Measurable Framework in the Pork Supply Chain". Or another session was described as "Engaging farmers in on-farm conservation and broader sustainability measurability initiatives....


Continuous Improvement kind of tags along on this same definitional train. It becomes the first outcome of measurement. To improve you need two measurements to find improvement. A beginning point and then a point after taking an action aimed at improving.

These two measurement activities are extremely common and completely human. I check my weight. I check my blood pressure. I measure rate of gain in pigs. I measure days on feed. And on and on through life. All with the idea of improving or doing better next time. Measurement and continuous improvement are not a new discovery or idea.


One of the first rules of management that I learned so very long ago says, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." I am not concerned with the word "measurement" in this management truism. I am concerned with who the "you" is that is doing the management. If the "you" is "me", an independent producer and free citizen, then the management does not seem so scary. If the "you" becomes a government board or an industry auditor, let alone a global agency, with the power to impose standards on management and demand proof of compliance, I, the farmer, have lost the ability to manage my own farm. I have fundamentally lost freedom.


The concepts of measurement, continuous improvement, and management become drivers in the Climate Change dogmas. Specifically, the dogma that Climate Change is caused by man's activities and therefore man's activities need to be managed by..... who?. The typical answer right now is that the management must be done by the government and more specifically a global government.


I am hearing an enormous amount of discussion in farming about measuring new things. "Precision Farming", "Carbon Sequestration", "Cover Crops", "Methane Digesters", to name a few, that require the measurement of parameters that are new to the agricultural discussion. In general anything attached to the Carbon Footprint discussion takes measurement and recordkeeping. Keep in mind that every measurement creates multiple data points that need to be recorded, stored, and analyzed. So there is a whole different discussion to be had about data, its use, security, and ownership. Not that measuring is bad, as I have said. It is "who" is managing with that information that concerns me.


A couple other thoughts and I will stop.


All this data collection, reporting, analysis, and management takes time, money, and talent. So a natural advantage is created for the larger operator who can afford it. Read this as consolidation or vertical integration. I have discussed thoughts on this topic at On Mergers Foreign Ownership and Consolidation


The animal welfare discussion would be enormously different if there was a way to measure pain in an animal or human for that matter. Without measurement, management is guess work and writing meaningful regulations is impossible.


So I hope I have helped to point out that the timeless little action of "measuring" has found deep roots in the Climate Change discussion. How that proceeds has large implications for the future freedoms of agricultural producers.


You may learn more about my involvement with the National Pork Board at my blog entitled A Seat on the National Pork Board

A Different Path to Sustainable Food Security

A friend posted this article to a group of agricultural communicators and asked for our thoughts.

Women in Agriculture


 I would like to answer this article with a personal story.

Some years ago I had the opportunity to visit David Forris and his wife in a remote Chinatec indian village in the mountains of southern Mexico, Oaxaca Province (our visit was not a tourist destination). Mr. Forris is aWycliff bible translator and has spent his career documenting the society, developing a written form of the language, translating helpful literature into the native language, teaching natives to read the language, then documenting the changes in society, here is his book. Of course his primary aim was to translate the Holy Scriptures for the people so that they might have easy access directly to the teaching of God and Christ for belief.

Mr. Forris (right) and I eat food cooked in a bannana leaf

What the documentation shows is that when people start to read the Gospel (the first thing translated) society starts to become more civil. Men stopped drinking, chasing women, neglecting their families, and the whole list of human failings. Women and children also responded favorably and began to benefit from the increased civility. I do not remember the details only the broad analysis.



a church service

One of the other observations/memories from my visit is evident in these pictures. Where are the man? I was told it was that time of year when the men went to find work in the cities or the U.S.. I realised then that the workers I always thought of as Mexican or Spanish, were in fact all of these things and many more.

a scenic corn field

Food is grown where ever it can be in the mountains. It was reported that people have "fallen out" of their corn fields.

a private home

Housing was rudimentary for many.

walking was the common form of transportation

Tranportation utilized old technology, but it still worked.

language school children

The society at the time of our visit was warm and welcoming.

So my response to the article at the lead of this blog post is to suggest that there are multiple paths forward. The path I witnessed in Mexico was uplifting men and women and children by addressing first their heartfelt need for a spiritual understanding of their condition. Then allowing them to work out the social details as fit their need. The article leaves me concerned that the men are being singularly blamed for the problem and overlooked in the solution. Beyond that I will hold my comments at the present time.