Through the Morehead-Cain’s Civic Collaboration summer, I conducted Agricultural Supply Chain research for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
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A team of five scholars, we were commissioned to examine agricultural supply chains and assess motives for companies to encourage their suppliers to implement agricultural Best Management Practices (BMPs). With the Turkey Hill Clean Water Partnership (THCWP) as a starting point for our research, we were tasked with identifying similar solutions and incentive structures to help improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay.
Findings
1.
Corporate partnerships based on financial incentives to drive farmer implementation of sustainability practices are currently unrealistic in the researched Chesapeake Bay watershed agricultural industries.
2.
Despite the current inability to create positive corporate incentive structures, there are still opportunities for CBF to collaborate with companies in each researched industry to accelerate agricultural conservation.
3.
Conservation plans and their implementation differ significantly farm by farm, so effective solutions must be tailored to the individual farm.