Environmental Sustainability

Sustainability video series:

1. Sustainability - Defining it

Happy Earth Day! In honor of Earth Day, today's sustainability video message revolves around the broad meaning of environmental sustainability to our farm.

Transcript of the video audio (in other words, here's the text version of everything I said in the video)

Environmental sustainability. I don’t know of many businesses that are as intertwined with the environment like we are as farmers. We do something to the environment and then it reacts and responds and provides something back to us in return. That interaction and engagement is so vital to a lot of the decisions we make of what we do and how we do it.

That often leads to the question of why do we just raise crops on our farm here in southeast Wisconsin near the Illinois border.

And it brings me back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with our five-year-old daughter. We were at Cabela’s looking at all the fish and we started talking about how the fish are different – the ones that live in the ocean versus lakes versus rivers versus streams. And we talked about how the fish have been purposely created to be suited to those specific environments.

And that’s what we have a lot here in the Corn Belt. The whole Midwest part of the United States – and we’re just in the edge of that – is very well-suited to growing crops like corn and soybeans. Our land is very flat, which reduces the risk of soil erosion and run-off. Our climate is very well-suited and our soil is very fertile and supports those different crops.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t farms in our area and throughout the Corn Belt that do other things. And we’re very grateful for them and we support them, as well. That’s just to say that’s why we do what we do.

And we’re happy to do that, and we’re happy to be a worldwide supplier of these products that are able to be used for so many different things – they’re very beneficial commodities. For people food, animal food, fuel for our vehicles – a renewable source, as well as for other unique products like crayons or plastics.

And we’re able to supply this on a worldwide scale. There are some other areas of the world that are also well-suited to growing crops like this. Namely South America – Brazil and Argentina – and there’s a lot of areas of the world that really can’t support much row crop production. So we’re considering that we’re using the tools and resources that we have and to be abundantly using them to the best of our ability.

Thank you.