When you know that over half of a tub of Ben & Jerry's is made up of dairy cream and milk it's no surprise to learn that we care a lot about where this comes from. In the USA, we are working with family farmers who have pledged not to treat their friesian friends with rBGH, so as to be able to provide us with dairy that's produced without unnecessarily violating the cow’s welfare by using growth hormones to enhance milk production.
In Europe we’ve gone one hoof beyond to ensure the small dairy farms we work with continue to milk cows but not the environment! Together with a group of like-minded farmers, industry and NGOs, we've launched a programme that seeks to help by establishing sustainable dairy standards that better balance the needs of man, cow, milk and the earth. Happy cows, happy farmers and a happy planet for future generations are our ultimate goals!
In May 2007, we have started a partnership with CONO cheesemakers, known for their Beemster cheese, to roll out the Caring Dairy approach among all their 600 farmers and become our exclusive dairy supplier in Europe. This means from 2008 onwards we can guarantee the use of 100% sustainably produced dairy in all our ice cream.
Click here for farmer stories and videos
To read more about our sustainable dairy farming programmes, click on links below:
Vermont based 'Dairy Farming Stewardship Alliance
For more information about: Sustainable agriculture, visit The SAI Platform
For questions regarding our Caring Dairy programme, please contact our European Social Mission Manager: anniek.mauser@benjerry.com
Sustainability Indicators: measuring sustainability performance
Caring Dairy has developed 11 sustainability indicators. For each indicator, measurement points or parameters have been defined that enable actual performance measurement. Each Caring Dairy farmer determines the focus of his improvement plan based on the farm situation – such as soil type, land division situation, farm strategy – and personal priorities.
To learn more about these indicators, click here.
What is Sustainable Dairy Farming?
Sustainable dairy farming is all about making continuous improvements to existing farming practices in ways that protect and enhance the natural environment, animal welfare, and local communities, while simultaneously ensuring profitability and providing a high quality of life for farmers and their families.
The Caring Dairy Programme
Launched in Europe in 2003, the Caring Dairy programme is a collaborative effort between Ben & Jerry's, local dairy farmers,CONO cheese makers, specialists from Wageningen University University and Research Centre (Wageningen UR), and non-governmental organisations World Wide Fund for Nature and the Netherlands Society for Nature.
Sustainable dairy farming is all about finding the balance between economic viability, social progress, environmental protection and animal welfare. In practical terms, it's all about creating Caring Dairy connections. Individual farmers are supported by specialists from universities and research centres to conduct a performance assessment, which measures a farm's level of sustainability against a comprehensive set of 11 key criteria - or "Sustainability Indicators" - for dairy farming. With the results from this self assessment individual farmers determine their priority areas where they will focus work on each year by means of developing and implementing improvement plans and evaluating the results after a year.
Eleven family farmers have enthusiastically participated in the pilot phase of the programme in which we have developed the self assessment tool for sustainable dairy farming. We have compensated these farmers for the hard work they have put in this.
In this next phase of upscaling the Caring Dairy way of working to all CONO farmers, the farmers receive a Caring Dairy price premium of €0,50/100 kg milk for active participation in the programme, on top of the existing price premium of €0,50/100 kg milk for grazing. The initial Caring Dairy pilot farmers have become CONO members and have an important coaching and inspirational function in the roll-out towards the 550 other CONO farmers.
Chat to our farmers
If there is anything you always wanted to know about dairy farming or of our Ben & Jerry's farmers, you can email your question to our Caring Dairy dairy farmers here. We'll try and get back to you as soon as possible but please remember that farmers are busy people so if the maize is being harvested or the grass ensilaged it might take a bit longer!
Click here to email us your question.
