Conscientious consumers are repeatedly encouraged to eat local, buy organic, seek out fair trade labels and ask about the traceability of a product’s supply chain. As sales of organic and ethically labeled products rise, companies both large and small have focused...
I’ve always had a deep-seated distrust of big business. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a social worker and teacher as parents, or because my first job out of school was with a nonprofit focused on fighting corporate abuses. Whatever the reason, this wariness...
In America, the agricultural sector is responsible for barely one percent of total energy consumption. But it's a different picture in India, where a whopping 18 percent of the nation's electricity goes to power agricultural water pumps. Problems in Indian...
The Erb Institute welcomes you to join us in celebrating a recent award for one of our new Erber's, Carissa De Young. Carissa is a newly-minted recipient of the Rackham Non-Traditional Fellowship. A path that started with a week long service trip to Mexico as a 15...
I worked with two organizations at Eastern Market in Detroit last summer: Farm Stand and Grow Eastern Market. My experience gave me insight on the food system and some of the challenges that exist in supplying fresh produce. It also reinforced my interest in working...
Since September 2015, students from the Ross School of Business and Erb Institute have worked on consulting projects for Shared-X, an agricultural social-venture startup supporting increased prosperity for smallholder farmers. As part of this action-based education,...
From trying to hold multiple crates of fruit to discussing the feasibility of market solutions, balance became an idea that I repeatedly thought about during my 2015 summer internship with the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture’s mobile market....
Report: Recycling at Keurig Green Mountain: A Brewing Problem (pdf abstract available) Purchase the full report on WDI Publishing (Case study #1-430-482) – published 06/2016, 16 pages Developed by: Alex Truelove, Ryan Moya, Daniel Patton, and Devina Trivedi. This case...
Food hubs are entities that connect farmers and food producers with larger markets for their products. Through funding from Erb Cool Projects, I attended the National Food Hub Conference in Atlanta, which was sponsored by the National Good Food Network. The biannual...
In February, I spent several days on EARTH University’s campus in the Guacimo region of Costa Rica, not far from Limon. I was there to visit family working with the university, and I had heard EARTH was a significant supplier of bananas to Whole Foods Market in the...