By Craig Cole
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Modern agriculture operates on a scale that’s hard to fathom. Gargantuan tractors and implements agitate the land, sowing crops in endless rows and gathering their yield at the conclusion of each season. It's a process repeated at millions of farms, big and small, globally, 365 days a year.
This industrialized process has fed the world for decades, but as the impacts of climate change, soil degradation and spiraling input costs get worse, farming will have to transition to more sustainable practices.The good news is, this can be done in a way that protects the land and sustains the farmers that work it, experts told the crowd assembled at Newsweek's The Future of Food & Agriculture Forum.
“I think in five to 10 years, ideally, we stop calling it regenerative agriculture, climate-smart agriculture, it just becomes agriculture,” said Allison Lin, global vice president of Healthy Planet and chief circularity officer at Mars.
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Lin added they have data that shows regenerative agriculture provides the yields we need while supporting the income of farmers. “At some point, it just becomes the normal way of doing business,” she said.
Naturally, governments have an important role to play in making agriculture more sustainable, and they’re doing exactly this in Brazil right now. Natasha Santos, vice president and head of sustainability and strategic engagement at Bayer Crop Science explained that the large, South American country has created a policy framework to identify and help restore degraded land, so it can be productive again.
“I think the most interesting mechanism that they put forward recently was Eco Invest,” said Santos. In this program, she explained, the Brazilian government makes public money available to privately owned banks to work as a catalyst. Those funds can then be used to entice much larger investments from private sources to dramatically scale up projects and get more done.
“We are talking about billions of dollars,” Santos said. “The last numbers that I’ve seen were around $3 billion from the public side, and that would be transferred to private banks, so they can mobilize around 1.5 to two times [that in] private investment money.” And with this amount of capital, millions and millions of hectares of land could be revitalized.
Farms, of course, grow more than just food. Plants are also cultivated for medicine and other purposes, including perfume. Sustainable agriculture is just as important in these industries as it is putting dinner on the table.
“We have over 500 ingredients in small quantities, and they’re living supply chains,” said Michal Benmayor, vice president of global innovation and sustainability perfumery at DSM-Firmenich, a chemical and fragrance company, adding that these supply chains are very fragmented.
To ensure they have adequate supplies of the items they need, Benmayor explained that they work with farmers to ensure they can produce the needed crops while earning a decent living saying, “For us, natural resilience is ingredient resilience is business resilience. It all needs to line up.”
To support farmers, DSM-Firmenich has done several things, including providing a minimum floor price. “In a sense, we promise a certain income that will assure livelihood, and then we also split the income across the year,” noted Benmayor. “A lot of these crops, they have a very short season, and therefore the farmers don’t have a steady income throughout the year. So sometimes it doesn’t have to be more investment, but the right investment at the right time,” she added.
In addition to helping farmers, implementing regenerative agricultural practices and rehabilitating the land itself, Lin said high tech can also make farming sustainable. She said: “We’re starting to see some tools emerge that can merge … climate forecasting, water risk and water scarcity, match that with your supply chain and your sourcing, and then the missing link is then to match that with your sales and your products.”
This could be another breakthrough for sustainable agriculture, though it’s still very early days for this kind of tech, she acknowledged.
Breeding and growing different plant varieties that are more adapted to certain conditions is yet another tool. Santos talked about rice strains that can be seeded directly into the ground rather than needing to be sprouted first. This slashes irrigation water usage and, as she noted, can reduce methane emissions by 40% to 45%, but that’s not all. “The most amazing thing is that from an economic perspective, all the farmers’ profit and los modeling that we’ve done … it shows quite a significant increase in profitability,” and this is because labor is also significantly reduced when the rice is directly seeded, another major win.
“I would say companies exist to make money in the long term, right? So, you have to take a long-term view of it, and that puts the environment front and center,” said Lin. “Mars has been around for 100 years, and we think … in generations. We have a saying: The world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today,” and that is the philosophy that will transform agriculture into something sustainable.
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