Source:  Michael Fielding, MEATINGPLACE, 6/21/11

Just over a year after he was promoted to senior vice president of corporate affairs as well as Smithfield Foods’ first chief sustainability officer, Dennis Treacy is leading the way for big processors in the ever-evolving world of corporate sustainability.

A good story around sustainability is important in the meat industry, as consumers become more attuned to who is producing the meat they eat and how they are doing it. The industry is continually met with resistance and criticism, as calls for locally sourced, “all-natural” food grow louder.

During a break in the American Meat Science Association’s 2011 Reciprocal Meat Conference in Manhattan, Kan., Monday, Treacy sat down with Meatingplace to discuss the details of the company’s award-winning sustainability program.

You’ve admitted that the very act of defining sustainability can dramatically limit a company’s sustainability strategy. How do you define sustainability?
Sustainability means different things to different people. You need to operate your business in a manner that improves the bottom line and does the least amount of harm to your neighbors and the environment. For Smithfield, it’s the five pillars of our sustainability program: environment, employee safety, animal welfare, food safety and community.

Before you joined Smithfield in 2002, you served as assistant attorney general in the natural resources section of the Virginia attorney general's office, which sued the company in 1998 for illegal wastewater discharges. What was it like going to work for Smithfield?
Easy. I like to make a difference. As a regulator, I reached out to Smithfield and realized they were well intentioned but couldn’t figure out how to do it. I saw an opportunity to make a difference. They gave me complete latitude to do what I thought was best and to design programs that I thought were solid. This is not squishy, feel-good stuff for us.

What are the components of your environmental program?
The ISO 14001 certification is the hallmark, the gold standard for environmental management systems around the world. We were first in the agriculture industry to earn it in 2002 at the farm level and in 2004 for the rest of our facilities. Now every farm we own in the world is ISO-certified. We have ingrained environmental management into our everyday decision-making process. Over the last decade, we have cut our water usage by 60 percent and our electricity usage by 46 percent. We also have logged $100 million in net cumulative cost reductions. We’re now targeting a 10 percent reduction in water, energy and solid waste by 2016 at all our IOCs (independent operating companies).

Third parties, including Temple Grandin, inspect your animal welfare program. In 2009 Smithfield achieved the certification for the Pork Quality Assurance Plus (PQA Plus) program. What’s new for Smithfield in terms of animal welfare?
We are in the process of converting every sow building into gestation pens instead of stalls. The stalls were designed by professionals to handle pregnant animals in the most humane way, but activist groups and the media were alarmed. So in 2005 we launched a three-year experiment of different penning systems to see if we could raise animals just as humanely in pens. Two years into it we realized we could.
Now we’re on track to be 30 percent complete by this December. A lot of the challenges involve a culture change. The ag industry historically has been filled with folks whose attitude is: 'We make it one way. Do you want to buy this product or not?’ Now customers are prescribing what we should be giving them. The days of line drawing are over. We have to retrain our work force and redesign all our buildings, but when our customers ask, we listen.

The meat industry is wrestling against the myths of 'factory farms’ and 'big food.’ How do you educate consumers about the industry?
The Michael Pollans of the world get to go on Oprah. We don’t get to do that. We just go to work every day trying to make a safe product. But we’ve a created cottage industry of people who make a living off of criticizing our industry. We need to get our own books out there and our own movies. We need to fight fire with fire.
 

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