Should it come to our country, here’s what we are going to be thinking about, here’s what we’re doing, and we’re set up and ready for it. But it’s a big, big challenge for the industry. I’d also highlight sustainability — not because agriculture isn’t sustainable, but because we haven’t always done the best job telling our story. The real challenge lies in the evolving rules of engagement in the sustainability space. As an industry, I believe we’re still catching up when it comes to having a seat at the table and clearly articulating where we contribute, where we don’t, and why. That’s a critical challenge, but one I see the industry beginning to step up to and face. We also need to think about how we’re positioning ourselves through our trade groups and industry representatives. Are we shaping the conversation or constantly playing catch-up? You know, are we playing from behind or are we playing proactively and hitting issues before they become major issues? I would say it is an area of opportunity. But from our lens, and when we think about how we deal with this, you know, we’ve set up our own communications team, we have our own government and public affairs department that helps us engage with legislators, lawmakers, regulators and the public as a whole. They create awesome venues for our people to be able to engage and offer different talents that we have to be able to provide common- sense approaches on select positions of ours, quite frankly, on behalf of the industry. Sustainability’s a growing priority in agriculture. And I know Christensen Farms has been an advocate for sustainability. I know I talked to some of your team about that. What other efforts do you have in place to ensure sustainability internally? You know, it’s funny because I’m speaking probably to the choir here, but agriculture as a whole has been sustainable. When you’re in a commodity environment, you’re always seeking to improve, use less resources to produce more. In the 1950s, we had 11 million sows. Now we’ve got 6 million in the United States, and we produce 40% more products. I mean, that’s the definition of sustainability in our industry. But we’re in our fourth year, I believe, of publishing our own sustainability report. And I won’t get into the details of it, but really it’s about, what are our core tenets or how are we going to approach sustainability as an organization?
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT NUMBERS OR VOLUME OF ANY SORT — IT’S ABOUT BEING BETTER EVERY DAY, BEING MORE SUSTAINABLE IN UTILIZATION OF OUR RESOURCES AND HOW
WE DEPLOY THEM IN THE EFFORT OF PORK PRODUCTION.
And we’ve concluded very quickly that we’re not going to get involved in any greenwashing or say something that we’re not. We’re going to be focused on and prioritize our impact, not our image. While that might seem counterintuitive, we’re more concerned internally about what can we do to improve the sustainability of the operation? And we define sustainability similar to the National Pork Board. It’s our people, it’s our pigs, it’s the planet. And as a business, it’s our prosperity, because without prosperity, we can’t invest in ourselves, in improvements necessary within the pillars of people, pigs, and planet. We also prioritize using actual data versus models. Many existing models are based on little studies in other countries, with the use of genetics from decades ago, further making the models and assumptions from antiquated data simply not accurate. We’ve invested in understanding where we stand, CO 2 emissions for example.
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