‘We will not be beaten by a lesser story told better’
Addressing the nature of agriculture, he said: “We operate in a very complex system. Having said that, we have to ensure that we communicate in a simplified manner. This is really one of the biggest challenges.” And an adage that Mark ascribed to a company colleague is worth repeating: “We will not be beaten by a lesser story told better.” And the story of agriculture is phenomenal, he said. “Sometimes, we do not tell it as well as we should. We cannot afford to be segmented or divided. We may trade between sectors but at the same time we need to work as one entity to the betterment of our industry. We have tradition and we have been tremendously resilient as a great community.”
The science of soil
There is a recurring theme in agriculture, he said: “The science of soil proves its carbon-capture nature. How we utilise that system to draw carbon down from the atmosphere and store it will be one of the biggest opportunities for agriculture in the coming years.
“The value of that carbon cycle must be leveraged to our benefit. The message we need to get out there is that we capture more carbon with our animals on the land. This fact is what will help us preserve our livestock farming system in the future.”
The nutrition messages
Highlighting the importance of nutrition, he said: “Eight hundred million people worldwide are hungry every day. One in 10 people on this planet is undernourished. One in four is malnourished. That’s two billion people, worldwide. They are staggering numbers. We know more about animal nutrition than we do about human nutrition.
“How do we overcome this knowledge deficit and how does the world see animal agriculture as an answer to the challenges of human nutrition? Poor nutrition is the single biggest threat to human health. We look at the size of the pharmaceutical industry and how much money is devoted to it, when the solution to so many of our health challenges is our own nutrition.”
The broken food system
Dr Hans Jöhr, a former corporate head of agriculture with Nestlé, delivered some thought-provoking insights on the inequalities of margin distribution, at the Alltech ONE conference. Speaking about the Calabrian red onion, a vegetable unique to the Italian region, he dissected the margin on a kilogramme of red onions from the producer to the consumer. The producer price delivered at the cooperative gate is €0.15/kg. In turn, the cooperative price to the trade is €0.30/kg, a doubling of the producer price, reflecting various costs including storage, warehousing, packing and transport to sale. The consumer price, however, is where the mark-up is truly astounding, especially given the fact that there are no intensive processing costs involved. At more than 50 times the price the producer receives, one kilogramme of Calabrian red onions is €7.80. While the figures may seem astounding, they are not out of kilter with many of the mark-ups across food items, not only in Italy but more generally across the world.
Dr Jöhr provided two more examples. The difference in the price of high-value wine between what the producer receives for growing the vine, harvesting the grapes, crushing, pressing, fermentation, clarification, and then ageing and bottling, and what the consumer pays is often remarkable. The selling price for top-class wine at the winery, sold as a six-pack, was €6 per bottle. As a gift box, the six-pack could fetch €18.50 per bottle. The consumer price in a restaurant was €95 per bottle.
Not content with those examples, he provided a third example of what he described as ‘the broken food system’. He traced a cup of coffee from the production of the basic ingredients to the supermarket sale point. A cup of cappuccino in a French supermarket costs an average €2.35. Sixty per cent of the price reverts to the supermarket with the milk, coffee, cocoa and sugar producers receiving a total of less than eight percent of the consumer price, between them.
There are, of course, costs along the way, transport, grading, storage, percolation etc.. But those costs cannot justify the fact that out of a €2.35 cup of coffee, the entire remuneration to the principal producers of the basic ingredients – milk, coffee, cocoa and sugar – is less than 20c. In summary, the breakdown of costs shows that the supermarket received 66 per cent of the total cappuccino price paid by the consumer, with the ingredient suppliers and various fabricators of the end product receiving 34 per cent of the end price. The figures provided a sobering take-home message from the Alltech ONE conference.
The Alltech approach
Replenishing the planet and providing nutrition for all was a major theme as Mark reflected on his travels across the globe: “We can only do it by working together. We also have to understand that we have different challenges in different parts of the world. In some places it is simply about having enough food, that basic calorific requirement to prevent starvation. In other places, food is starting to become something very different. It is part of people’s identity, an aspect of the kind of person one is as an individual human being. That is when the added-value aspect becomes the dominant driver.
“Our entire economy is built on fossil fuels. We have to come up with ways, not just to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but also to act on the types of restorative environmental actions that we must take. We have to be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere if we are to overcome the climate challenges facing us.”
He claimed that many people are making self-interested decisions. “Because of that, we do not have, today, in our system, an ability to nourish our planet in the the way we should,” he said. Farmers need to be given ownership and empowered to take charge of creating sustainable food systems. They must be provided with the tools they need to take the right actions.”
That ownership of change was referenced by EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness in an earlier presentation when she said: “I have never met a farmer who wanted to destroy the environment. They live by it.”
A positive outlook
Mark adopted an optimistic view of the future: “We are living in an extraordinary moment and what a tremendous opportunity is before us,” he said. “We have a chance to leave our legacies, most especially in the manner in which we manage sustainability and climate challenges. Agriculture is central to that legacy development. We have the ability and scale to change and we are making tremendous progress.”