Tyson teams with MyFarms

Tyson Foods is linking up with Jay County’s MyFarms as part of an effort to meet its sustainability goals.

Tyson, parent company of Tyson Mexican Original of Portland, has joined forces with MyFarms on a pilot project involving an initial 250,000 acres of corn and making use of MyFarms tools to generate data on land stewardship practices.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, MyFarms’ supply chain platform streamlines agricultural data management, analytics and reporting in an innovative way.

“Such technology can reform the food system's tendency to burden grain suppliers with time-intensive, complex and duplicative sustainability reporting requirements that return no value to them,” the EDF said this week.

The giant food company recently decided to speed up its land stewardship practices by 2020. Its suppliers farm some 2 million acres of corn.

“To be successful, Tyson needs to collaborate with vast networks of farmers on solutions, and it needs them to report progress,” the EDF said.

“Delivering pragmatic business insights to growers through a digital conduit such as MyFarms may create shared value between the company and its grain suppliers, a critical component for an initiative like this to take root and grow,” the EDF said. “The MyFarms platform readily integrates platforms farmers already use to manage their fields. It allows them to leverage already-existing cloud data applicable to their operations, and to consistently report for sustainability purposes from several platforms at one time. Among other things, these platforms help farmers more efficiently manage applied nitrogen fertilizer, an essential nutrient for plants and livestock to grow."