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A biogas process being used in Turkey reduces plant operations while providing potato farmers with more sustainable soil nutrients.

Costco Wholesale Corporation will stop sourcing its salmon from Chile due to "record levels" of antibiotic use by farmers, according to Reuters. The company will begin sourcing "antibiotic-free" salmon from Norway.

Procter & Gamble is conducting an in-field study to help small farmers improve their palm oil and palm kernel oil production as part of its goals to achieve zero deforestation in the palm oil supply chain made earlier this year.

By 2015, Unilever aims to have the tea in all Lipton tea bags sourced from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ estates. By 2020, 100 percent of Unilever's tea will be sustainably sourced. This video shows some of the work done in partnership with regional plantation companies and smallholder farmer-based private factories in Turkey in an effort to attain sustainable agriculture practices.

Walmart launched a new sustainable agriculture strategy emphasizing locally sourced produce, sustainability training for farmers, and supply-chain environmental assessments. The company will also seek to reduce food waste in stores, purchase sustainable palm oil, and avoid Brazilian beef linked to Amazon deforestation.

IKEA achieved its goal to source 100% of its cotton from sustainable farmers that use less water, less chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. As a result, IKEA has become the first major retailer to achieve this goal across all product categories.

Martin von Hildebrand, founder of the Fundacion Gaia Amazonas, is working to establish an ecological corridor protecting 333 million acres of rain forest stretching from Colombia to the Brazilian coast. That will involve finding ways to work with the loggers, miners and farmers already active in the area, he says. "We have to look at those areas where there already is something like oil, or like agriculture, or like cattle ranching and approach it from a sustainable point of view," he explains. 

But for ice cream super brand Ben & Jerry's, carbon pricing is already a reality, allowing the scheme to pay U.S. dairy farmers to invest in onsite renewable energy generation and other clean technologies as it looks to slash its supply chain emissions.

Two of the world's leading sustainability certification bodies, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ, plan to merge later this year in an effort to simplify the certification process for sustainable agriculture. Under the name Rainforest Alliance, the organization create a single global certification standard by 2019 that will streamline certification for farmers and empower companies to build more responsible supply chains, more efficiently.

British supermarket group Sainsbury's has launched its own in-house sustainability standard, provoking backlash from The Fairtrade Foundation and Fairtrade producers alike. Developed as part of its Sustainability Standards Program, the 'Fairly Traded' label is Sainsbury's attempt to simplify the complex landscape of certifications, while providing more direct support to farmers. But the Fairtrade community fears the move will put the producer-buyer relationship out of whack, with producers ultimately coming out on the losing end.

Here's a sobering fact: The average American generates 4.4 pounds of trash daily, a whopping 30 percent of it packaging. Some people might read that statistic and vow to be stricter about recycling. Julie Corbett took things a tad further.

A group of companies - including General Mills, The Hershey Company, and Nestlé - have committed to working with the governments of Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana to end cocoa-related deforestation, protect national parks from illegal cocoa production, and improve the livelihoods of smallholder cocoa farmers. The initiative is led by IDH - the Sustainable Trade Initiative, the Prince of Wales's International Sustainability Unit, and the World Cocoa Foundation, in partnership with the governments of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.

Since 2014, oil companies reported that they used more than 20 million pounds and 2 million gallons of chemicals in their operations, including at least 16 chemicals the state of California classifies as carcinogens or reproductive toxicants under the state's Proposition 65 law. That recycled wastewater was then sold to irrigation districts largely in Kern County. The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board has allowed the practice for at least four decades and only recently required the oil companies and water districts to disclose the details. EWG detailed its findings in a report released Wednesday, two days before a public meeting of an expert panel convened to study the practice's safety. Although scientists don't know whether using oil field wastewater to grow crops poses a health risk to people who eat the food, the water board has refused to halt the practice until the expert panel releases its findings.