If You Really Want to Understand What Sustainable Business is All About, Check Out Sustainable Agriculture

While doing research on Food & Beverages, I came upon a site on Sustainable Agriculture (www.sustainabletable.org). It's nice to see farms that actually look the way farms do when portrayed in cartoons, or commercials, that is, blue skies, green pastures, grazing animals.

Having writtten about corporate citizenship in the past, I'm not unfamiliar with the concept of "sustainablity". There's a lot of impressive literature out there, and many posted manifestos describing a new way of doing business, so that all business serves mankind, if not directly, then indirectly, by not doing harm to the environment, or neglecting the needs of the community, in the process of building the company, the brand, the empire, etc... However, as exciting and inspiring as it is to read about sustainable business, it's even more powerful to see what change can really look like.

Which brings me back to the cows grazing in the pasture. Compare images of small herds of cows grazing out in the open air vs. large herds packed indoors. Not only does it make you want to pay the extra dollar for organic milk in a recyclable bottle, it makes you want to step out of the office more often.

That said, without suggesting that employees are cattle, but really stressing that they are not, I recommend the sustainable dairy farm as a role model for sustainable business. The incentive industry is more than a simple equation of rewards and performance, it's about the difference between being enslaved in a job and being happy at a job; how quality of life affects the quality of performance. The sustainable business model I think supports the better side of that distinction and I think that the visible beauty of sustainable farms best illustrates the overall potential of sustainable business best.