The companies are partnering with farmers to improve pulse sustainability
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Avena Foods Ltd., a specialty miller of gluten-free pulse and Purity Protocol oat ingredients in Western Canada, is on the road to advance pulse sustainability.
The company recently announced joining Field to Market Canada, a multi-stakeholder organization that’s working to measure, define and advance sustainability of fibre, food, feed and fuel production.
In partnership with Field to Market Canada, Avena Foods is the first company to register a continuous improvement project focused on advancing pulse sustainability, said the release.
“Avena has a strong commitment to sustainable agriculture,” said Margaret Hughes, vice-president of sales and marketing for Avena. “When we moved into this project, we'd already written a white paper on sustainability – essentially a statement of Avena’s understanding of the social, environmental and economic impacts of our activities both on the communities where we work and on the stakeholders in our value chain. This understanding incorporates Avena’s Purity Protocols towards safe, clean gluten-free oat and pulse ingredients.”
This project takes Avena’s goals around sustainability to the next level. It measures sustainability of pulse crops in Saskatchewan in five key areas: land-use efficiency, soil conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, energy use and soil carbon.
The initial goals of the project are to “develop a baseline understanding of the impact of pea and oat farming on the environment, and be a part of the value chain that supports potential solutions in improving some of the metrics around sustainable agriculture, for example greenhouse gas emission, water use and soil health,” Hughes told Farms.com.
Avena is committed to “looking at our own milling processes, and the ingredients that go into food products in order to gain a better understanding of how using these ingredients, grown and milled in Saskatchewan, can actually improve the sustainability of a food or beverage product.”
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