Life on the pea harvest

I hope you’ve all had a look at the Growing for the future website which is where we explain what we are doing on sustainable developments.

I just wanted to bring this subject up really, why are we interested in sustainable development? Well of course, it’s our 60th pea harvest this year as I’ve mentioned before, so what do we have to do to ensure that we have a 120th harvest and during that time, maintain a healthy business both in terms of supply of raw materials, in terms of a healthy business in the marketplace and one were everyone can operate successfully as we have for the last 60 years.

I think part of what we have to do is recognise the challenges we’re going to face over those years and indeed have a plan to addapt to those challenges. Things like pollution which has to be brought under control, the whole issue to do with non-renewable resources—we have to find a solution to that—and of course climate change which we’ve mentioned earlier. So their are many, many things that are there to be dealt with.

With our sustainability programme, we’ve divided it up into three main sustainability indicators. These look at three main areas:

1. The physical aspect—the soil, water and air
2. The environmental aspect—where we take into account our responsibility towards the environment
3. The social aspect—what we do within the community and what we do with the people we rely on in the supply chain, whether that’s our suppliers, our harvest people, or our transport people, so it goes right the way through the whole business.

This is a very complex subject as you’ll appreciate, but if we look at in simple terms, if we’re not sustainable, we don’t have a business into the future. So there’s a significant case for sustainable development.

We’ll need to understand what customer expectations of us as a leading brand in the future will be, and in particular be sensitive to consumers’ need to know the companies behind the brands…

I’ll give you some more of my thoughts perhaps tomorrow.

thank you

Tags: sustainability, agriculture, sustainable agriculture, nonrenewable, pollution