WORCESTER — Gary Hirshberg, head of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s leading organic yogurt producer, said he has flown over Florida and Louisiana while sugar cane farmers were burning the fields to harvest the crops.
It is a terribly wasteful process, and is destructive to the topsoil, he said, as he spoke to an audience gathered at the Hogan Center at College of the Holy Cross last night for the William J. O’Brien Distinguished Lecture Series.
“It’s a carbon release of the first order of magnitude, it’s just incredible,” he said.
He brought up the illustration to contrast it with what his company has done to promote sustainable, organic farming methods. He said his organic sugar comes from a 40,000-acre farm in Brazil. The sugar cane is not burned. Instead, a machine separates the sugar cane from the waste plant material and puts the waste back on the field right there on the farm. That way, the topsoil is not harmed.
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