Projects

Driven by members Walmart and Kellogg, the Collaborative has begun to dig deeper into the connection between consumers, sustainable agriculture, and farmers and how those connections drive decision making across the supply chain. Building on prior work delivering a shopper engagement campaign focused on more sustainable farming practices, members are developing a next phase of the campaign to better understand consumer interest in products produced using more sustainable farming practices.

The Collaborative is proud to host a session at VERGE 20 where members will join industry experts to share the latest consumer insights, and discuss how companies along the supply chain are adapting to growing demand from consumers that their food have a positive environmental impact, support local communities, and fit into a healthy lifestyle.

A partnership between Unilever and PepsiCo, this program supports farmers in building the health of their soils while reducing nitrogen runoff.

Through a partnership with Practical Farmers of Iowa, these two Collaborative members are working to remove barriers to adoption through providing financial aid and technical support, while catalyzing scaled adoption by supporting shared learning among farmers.

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 and Bunge to enroll growers in a program that provides an economic analysis of options for soil health interventions, peer-to-per 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, Kellogg and The Nature Conservancy launched the Supporting U.S. Farmers project to provide farmers with funds and technical assistance to improve their practices.

Through this partnership, Collaborative members expect to provide hundreds of 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 demonstrate that agriculture can contribute significantly to improved environmental outcomes.

Building on the success of the Forum on Conservation Finance in Agriculture that the Collaborative hosted in 2019, members Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy are developing a pilot for a soil health lending product that removes financial barriers and risks for farmers to implement sustainable farming practices.

Growing concern for agricultural resilience among agricultural lenders has rendered this work especially timely, and members of this work group anticipate the release of the product will provide valuable insight to the integration of on-farm resilience with lending models.