Steering Committee
The steering committee brings external oversight to support delivery.
Assisted by the Global Farm Metric team and the working groups, the steering committee are responsible for defining the project outcomes, supporting the framework development and communications, identifying potential risks and opportunities and providing overall guidance for its development, delivery and future governance.
The members of the committee are representatives of the coalition partners. They bring deep understanding and experience of the food and farming sector with expertise to support the successful development and adoption of a Global Farm Metric.
The Global Farm Metric Team
Supported by the Sustainable Food Trust, the team provides coordination for the steering committee and the working groups.
They oversee the test and trials programme and work with external specialist and scientific communities, farmer groups, NGOs and stakeholders. The Global Farm Metric team lead on building consensus and alignment, safeguarding the integrity and principles of the Global Farm Metric across all the working groups.
Working Groups
There has been an overwhelming consensus among key stakeholders in the food and farming industry of the need for a common framework for defining and measuring impacts at farm-level.
To deliver this mission, the Global Farm Metric Coalition form five core working groups: farmers and land-managers, infrastructure and governance, international, metrics and stakeholder. They are now working with the Global Farm Metric team to bring their external perspective, industry expertise and insight to the working groups.
Farmers & Land Managers
Working to co-design, trial and pressure test the framework to ensure it is useful and meaningful to those working on the ground.
Metric Refinement
Initiated by farmers, the role of the metric working group is to develop, refine and test the framework. They bring external oversight to the work of the Global Farm Metric team who are carrying out the process of scientific review, on-farm testing and refinement.
They are there to ensure the data gathering remains practical at farm level and the framework is aligned with existing specialist tools, certification schemes, national and international metrics.
Governance and Infrastructure
The governance and infrastructure group are working to create the roadmap for national and international adoption of the Global Farm Metric. They are there to ensure the Global Farm Metric remains in the commons, relevant and rigorous, with the necessary governance and infrastructure to enable its wide adoption and ongoing refinement in line with emerging science and technology.
Stakeholder Application
The stakeholder application working group establish and oversee global trials to verify how the Global Farm Metric can be used in key sectors and supply chains, including farming, government, food companies and finance.
Their work includes a review of existing ESG metrics for finance; the potential of using the Global Farm Metric as a baseline for UK ELMs and SFI payments, sustainability standards at farm-level for procurement within the supply chain, and standard data for use in consumer labelling.
International
The international working group focus on gaining support for and adoption of the Global Farm Metric in the international arena with organisations such as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); Guidelines Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture (SAFA); the Sustainable Agriculture Platform (SAI); Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU); World Business Council (WBC); World Benchmarking Alliance; Sustainable Markets Initiative; and One Planet Business for Biodiversity (OP2B).
Coalition Partners
The Global Farm Metric is a growing coalition of over 80 organisations from across the global food and farming sector, including farmers, agronomists, academic institutes, environment groups, certifiers, food companies, financial services and government agencies.
We are working together to establish a common language and framework for on-farm sustainability to be embedded into existing platforms and assessments.
These are some of the organisations that have been driving the mission.
