Putting Together a Measure of Sustainability

Feb 28, 2023

With companies now publishing sustainability reports annually, you may wonder how these reports are put together.

The word sustainability is popping up everywhere these days it seems. Companies are constantly releasing information on how they plan to be more sustainable. These plans are mainly released in the forms of reports, and there’s now a whole industry focused on helping those reports to be made.

“Sustainability issues are so complex and intertwined. For example soil, water stewardship, carbon and the volume of potato a farmer can grow. All of those sustainability issues really overlap with each other — they’re all interconnected,” Emma Bedlington, manager at Stratos, said during a presentation at Manitoba Potato Production Days on Jan. 25, 2023.

Traditionally, companies have made annual reports, and in these reports they’ll outline their profits and losses. Recently though, these reports have started to include more external information that’s not directly related to financials, she added. Companies will now talk about some of their social programs, or their company governance — these are all environmental, social and governance issues and are called ESG

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Video: How American Farmers Harvest 1.15 Billion Pounds of Sunflowers

Across the open plains of North Dakota and South Dakota, sunflower fields turn the American landscape into a sea of gold. In this farming documentary, we go inside modern sunflower farming to see how farmers plant, grow, harvest, clean, dry, process, and transform sunflower seeds into valuable products used every day.

In 2024, American farmers harvested about 1.15 billion pounds of sunflowers. This video follows the full journey from warm spring planting to combine harvesting, seed cleaning, storage, oil extraction, refining, roasting, packaging, and animal feed production.

You will see how sunflower seeds are processed into cooking oil, roasted snacks, bakery ingredients, birdseed, livestock feed, and useful byproducts. From golden fields to modern processing plants, this is the story of how a beautiful flower becomes one of America’s important oilseed crops.

Watch until the end to discover how sunflower farming connects farmers, machines, factories, food production, and sustainable agriculture.