Responsible production, in practice rather than in principle

Almost every agricultural website has a sustainability section, and most of them are written in a way that cannot be checked. We would rather describe the parts we can act on directly and be quiet about the parts we cannot yet evidence.

What we can act on now

• Cultivation practices chosen for the condition of the soil and the land, not only for yield
• Input use planned and recorded rather than applied by habit
• Handling and storage that reduce how much product is lost after harvest
• Fair, agreed terms with the growers our supply depends on

The third of those is the least discussed and often the largest. Product lost between harvest and delivery is waste that has already consumed a full season of land, water and labour. Reducing it is both the cheapest environmental improvement available to an agricultural business and the one that pays for itself.

What we are not going to claim

We are not publishing environmental figures we are not yet measuring, and we are not going to describe an aspiration in a way that reads as an achievement. When a practice is established and measured, it will be described here with what is actually being measured.