Anheuser-Busch is the first company to display the new US Farmed certification seal on its products. The certification was announced in March by American Farmland Trust, led by acting president and CEO Dr. Beth Sauerhaft.

“US Farmed is a certification and packaging seal program that any consumer packaged-good company, food or beverage company can use when they have 95% or more of their agricultural ingredients coming from items that were grown right here in the United States. So for Anheuser-Busch, it means that the packages that they are going to be labeling where they’ve certified that means that those 95% of the grains or more are coming from being grown right here in this country. So it’s a really exciting program.”

In an exclusive interview with SFN, Sauerhaft says the seal on product packaging will help build demand for US-produced food and fiber.

“Our mission is all about protecting farmland, deploying forward-looking conservation practices on the land and ensuring that there’s a new generation of farmers and ranchers to work that land and stay on that land. And so a really critical piece of all of that being successful is making sure that we have a viable agricultural industry here in this country. And what better way to do it than to make sure that there’s a market for these domestically produced goods.”

The US Farmed certification process propels the mission of AFT.

“The funds that come in from the certification program will be used to help enable American Farmland Trust to provide technical resources and advisory services to farmers across the country, to talk with them about Farmland Protection, and talk about succession planning or land access and transfer, some of the most critical things that not every farmer may think about or know exactly how to do. This sort of gives them a lot of that starting information and then, of course, we can point them to much more information.

Sauerhaft outlines the steps required for certification.

“A great place to start that would be by going to our website, farmland.org/us-farmed. That’ll give you all sorts of information and how to get started, and then we connect you with the company that is doing verification. And basically, you have to be able to show where you’re getting your agricultural materials from, and it’s an annual thing. I mean, I’m not gonna say it’s simple, simple, simple, but it’s as far as various certification programs go, this is much more straightforward than many.”