McDonald’s teams with Alberta beef producers
Sustainable agriculture is a popular environmental concept, and fast becoming a well-worn catchphrase. Greg Bowie, chair of Alberta Beef Producers, says sustainability was a practice among Alberta beef ranchers long before it became a trendy topic of conversation among consumers.
“The ranching community has been around Alberta for well over 100 years, and a lot of the land they operate on is in as good, or better, condition than it was when they first came to this province with cattle,” says Bowie.
Now, a new initiative by McDonald’s — the fast food giant whose livelihood depends on burgers — is driving home the message that beef can be produced in a sustainable fashion, one that creates healthy food and respects the planet, and cattle producers, at the same time.
Bowie is part of a pilot project that will see McDonald’s purchasing, in 2016, an as-yet-to-be-determined portion of its beef from sources that are verified sustainable. The project’s goal is to develop an independent system to measure and verify sustainability, to be run in Canada through the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef.
“We’re hearing more and more from consumers who are interested in safety and quality and sustainability attributes, and a lot of that stems from where (the food) comes from and how it’s grown,” says Jeffrey Fitzpatrick-Stilwell, senior manager sustainability for McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada. “In the end, we want to be able to credibly talk to consumers about the positive story about Canadian beef and our sourcing of it.”
More than 100 Alberta ranches have registered in the pilot. Twenty-seven, including Bowie’s, have been deemed verifiable so far. McDonald’s hopes to have 300 Alberta producers on board by the time the pilot ends in the spring of 2016. Participating ranchers must meet a series of standards for land management, food safety, and animal health and welfare practices.
McDonald’s website states the pilot project will enable Canada to be the first jurisdiction worldwide to claim a portion of verified sustainable beef from birth to burger. Fitzpatrick-Stilwell says McDonald’s long-term goal is to source all its beef globally from verified sustainable sources — but it will be 2016 before the corporation knows the timeline of that goal.
All the beef sold in the 1,400 Canadian McDonald’s restaurants — about 65 million pounds a year — is raised in this country, mostly in Alberta and Saskatchewan. All of the 100-per-cent-beef patties sold at McDonald’s in this country, about 500 million, are put together at a single location in Spruce Grove.
Fitzpatrick-Stilwell says McDonald’s chose Canada to initiate its first verified sustainable beef pilot project in part because Canada has been a global leader in developing traceability systems to monitor cattle from farm to slaughterhouse.
Bowie, who has a ranch near Ponoka and has raised cattle for some 40 years, hopes having Alberta producers involved with the McDonald’s program will raise awareness of the positive impact ranching has on the environment and economy in Alberta.
“Here in Alberta, there is a huge amount of land that is not suited to raising other crops, outside of grass,” says Bowie, who has between 100 and 130 head of cattle. “Not only does grass provide food for cattle, most range lands are very biodiverse, so it’s positive for the land, for the plants, animals, and insects, and it’s much more diverse than other farm lands.
“The World Wildlife Federation (WWF) and others have come to realize in the last few years that the best way to preserve wildlife species is to protect ranchers. A healthy rangeland provides the proper environment for biodiversity and a wide range of different species, both in plants and animals.”
The WWF, which works alongside McDonald’s in the U.S. to promote sustainable ranching, is on the record as saying beef production, when sustainably managed, benefits conservation. That’s because grazing keeps grasslands healthy, ups soil quality with manure, and preserves wildlife habitat.
Bowie says there are a lot of “misperceptions” about cattle production.
“We haven’t done a good job of telling the story of how we are utilizing land that isn’t good for other types of production, and are cre- ating an excellent nutrient source for the human population,” says Bowie.
To Bowie, sustainable cattle ranching takes into account the environment as well as the well-being of producers and social factors.
“People like to be able to see wildlife and green fields and green trees and blue water, and in Alberta, a whole lot of land that provides those things is land that is used for raising beef cattle.”