Regenerative Farming - Together towards a resilient future

This week I’ll be attending Climate Week in New York with the primary goal of engaging experts and other companies on how we can facilitate the shift to regenerative farming with more speed, alignment and ambition than ever before. Using the Climate Groups tagline for Climate Week 24, ‘Its time’ we start scaling this area – Together.

With the many challenges facing our planet, why focus on regenerative farming? Well, because beer is an agricultural product, after all. The barley, hops and other grains we use to brew our beverages come from farms, and the way those farms are operated and managed has a tremendous impact on the planet. This is precisely why it is our responsibility at Carlsberg to push for a more resilient agricultural system.

For a bit of reference, the World Economic Forum published a report in 2022, finding that if just 20% more farmers adopted more sustainable agricultural practices, by 2030 the EU could reduce its agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 6%. At the same time, farmer livelihoods would increase by between €1.9 and €9.3 billion annually by 2030.[1] Figures like this should be a call to action, that this shift in agriculture is not just good for the planet – it has a sound business case.

While there’s a fairly clear consensus on the need to pursue regenerative agriculture, there are still too many roadblocks standing in the way of progress. While we know that shifting from conventional agriculture to regenerative practices provides an economic benefit to farmers, the immediate costs of transition are less clear. What kind of funding and support will there be to encourage farmers to make this shift? Do farmers have all the technology and data necessary to make this shift and document it? And how exactly should we define regenerative farming – given the different climate and soil conditions all around the world?

Despite these – and many other – pressing questions, progress is happening. At Carlsberg, for instance, our markets and brands are serving up inspiring case studies of what can happen when we prioritize regeneratively grown grains. In Finland, for example, the KOFF Christmas Beer has been brewed with regeneratively grown barley since 2022, expanding in scope each year. Halfway across the world in Laos, our team is working closely with farmers and a national research institute on a sustainable rice farming project that incorporates a number of regenerative principles. The farmers in this program tell us that they hear more birds chirping and cicadas buzzing near the fields than they have in years past – an anecdote they attribute to the reduction in pesticides and promotion of soil health.

The ambition is there, the success stories are there, and the need is DEFINITELY there. The missing link so far has been an aligned, top-to-bottom approach to support these shifts and offer farmers the certainty that there is indeed an appetite for this new paradigm. The food and beverage industry has some fantastic building blocks for strong collaboration in place. The SAI platform, for example, has offered a pre-competitive network for companies committed to sustainable agriculture for over 20 years. Likewise, the World Economic Forum’s First Movers Coalition for Food brings together actors across the food and beverage supply chain to send a critical collective demand-signal for low-carbon farming methods.

But what is needed now goes beyond strong collaboration across an industry. It requires that every actor who has a vested interest in the value chain of farmed goods – farmers, traders, customers, suppliers, politicians, NGOs, academics – come together to figure out the necessary actions to see a substantial uptake of regenerative farming. Carlsberg has committed to using only regeneratively farmed grains in our products by 2040. The only way we will meet this target is by spearheading a level of collaboration that simply doesn’t exist today.

It’s precisely this need for collaboration that makes me excited to join other movers and shakers at Climate Week. Our ESG programme is called Together Towards ZERO and Beyond, after all. We can’t do it alone. So, let’s figure out how put the pieces together and set ourselves up for a resilient future of agriculture.

It’s time!...

[1] WEF_Transforming_Food_Systems_with_Farmers_A_Pathway_for_the_EU_2022.pdf ( weforum.org )