Stop Food Waste Day
Fight food waste day with us!
It’s one of our most important resources, yet we waste or lose one-third of it.
When viewed at a global scale, the issue of food waste is not only on a par with the biggest topics of our day, but intricately connected with them: hunger and poverty, climate change, and health and wellbeing.
Most of all, it massively affects agriculture’s bold attempts to be sustainable: wasting food is a waste of the energy and resources involved in growing, harvesting, processing and preparing food for consumption. That’s why FertiGlobal is a staunch supporter of Stop Food Waste Day, held this year on Wednesday, 26 April.
Originally set up in 2017 by Compass Group USA, one of the leading foodservice companies, the day has become a global phenomenon with the intention to educate everyone involved in the food chain – that’s the planet’s entire human population – about the importance of adopting new attitudes and behaviours in our approach to food and the way we use it.
And while much of Stop Food Waste Day’s activities are directed further down the food chain – at chefs and industry leaders and food influencers and consumers – at FertiGlobal we’re determined to play our part in helping our farmers, those who produce our valued food, to get the most from their fields and their crops to help reduce food waste ‘at source’, as it were.
That’s because our products focus on protection. Soil, seed, plant, yield or farmer – our products are designed to offer protection from beginning to end of the crop life cycle, using our Total Crop Management philosophy.
Why is that important? Firstly, it’s the obvious: farmers want to ensure they get the most from their crop. It’s an investment from which they want the best return. Total Crop Management, with its holistic approach, looks at the crop’s entire lifecycle. Realising yield potential is dependent on optimising plant health: a healthy plant delivers not just a healthy yield, but a marketable yield. Because potatoes that are too small, or lettuces that are too ‘leggy’, might not even make it out of the field and certainly won’t get beyond the farm gate. That’s one of the first ‘stations’ on the route to wasting one-third of the food we produce.
Secondly, we recognise that for the produce that does make it beyond the farm gate, farmers can’t control what happens to it. Its fate is in someone else’s hands. But, by exercising their choice in product selection, they can invest beyond the farm gate. Shelf life, resistance to moulds, less susceptibility to damage during handling and processing – all these desirable characteristics are concurrent with a healthy plant that’s had its natural defence processes stimulated by our high quality, bioavailable compounds.
FertiGlobal products are an investment in the food chain. We’re helping to minimise food waste and, in so doing, bring about the more sustainable, more profitable and more productive approach to agriculture that will help alleviate those interconnected topics previously highlighted.
What can you do to raise awareness of food waste? What attitudes and behaviours can you change, either in yourself or in others? To find out more, and access all the resources and more inspiration, go to the Stop Food Waste Day website.
Fight Food Waste with us!