Projects

PepsiCo, Unilever, and Cargill partner with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) to provide financial and technical support to farmers and promote shared learning to remove barriers to the adoption of regenerative practices. The companies built a cost share program to help farmers add cover crops, reduced tillage, diverse crop rotation, and advanced nutrient management to their operations. Farmers in Iowa and Eastern Nebraska growing corn and soybeans for PepsiCo, Unilever, and Cargill’s supply chains are eligible. By adding practices to more acres, MRCC members and PFI aim to improve soil health and water quality, sequester carbon, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve climate resilience, and strengthen farm economics.

In a partnership between Cargill and PepsiCo, farmers are provided with the data and economic analyses to demonstrate the economic opportunity of cover crop practice adoption, and Practical Farmers of Iowa provides producers with agronomic assistance and peer-to-peer networks.

This project’s model leverages the value of supply chain partners by training Cargill originators to provide outreach, improving scalability beyond direct program participants.

Collaborative members PepsiCo and The Nature Conservancy have teamed up with Precision Conservation Management, a program of the Illinois Corn Growers Association, to enroll growers in a program that provides an economic analysis of options for soil health interventions, peer-to-peer networks, and access to cost share for first-time acres.

This program’s results have revealed a strong grower appetite for soil health-building interventions when the economic case for soil health is demonstrated, providing farmer benefit and enabling substantial greenhouse gas reductions.

In 2019, Kellanova (formerly Kellogg Company) and The Nature Conservancy launched the Supporting U.S. Farmers project to provide farmers producing corn, wheat, and rice with funds and technical assistance to improve their practices.

Through this partnership, MRCC members are providing farmers with funds and technical assistance to implement conversation practices such as cover crops, conservation tillage, nutrient management, vegetative buffers, irrigation efficiency, and wetland restoration, and are demonstrating that agriculture can significantly contribute to improved environmental outcomes.

MRCC members Nutrien and PepsiCo collaborate with Ingredion and the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund to provide financial incentives and agronomic advisory to build on-farm conservation for producers growing corn.

The program, underway since 2020, helps producers add cover crops, no-till, and nutrient management into their operations. The goal is to catalyze farmer adoption of practices that generate measurable carbon reductions.