Quick decisions today to provide food for tomorrow

By Chuck Magro
President & CEO

COVID-19 continues to impact communities around the world at an exponential rate and, as people prepare for social distancing, we’re all seeing a shortage on grocery store shelves. 

While many of us will experience some frustration about not being able to find things on our grocery lists, this is a short-term problem. As an agriculture industry, we need to look ahead to future food production to ensure this isn’t a long-term issue. Nutrien is at the beginning of the food supply chain, and our role as an essential service, is more critical than ever. 

We are proud to be part of a strong, sophisticated food system that’s committed to getting food to tables, even under the most difficult circumstances. We service the world. But it’s spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and we’re focused on providing farmers with the services and solutions they need to plant their crops, to ensure that grocery store shelves are full this fall, and beyond. 

Here’s what we’re doing:

• First and most importantly, we’re focused on the health and safety of our employees, their families and our communities. Safety is always one of our core values and to us, nothing is more important. 
• We’re making every effort to minimize business interruption while keeping our employees safe. From implementing remote working for our employees who can, to limiting access to our manufacturing facilities and branch locations, we’re working hard to ensure continuity of our products and services for our customers globally. 
• We’re empowering our supply chain and distribution teams to accelerate fertilizer, seed and other critical products into the market for customers now. We want farmers to be able to start preparing early for spring planting, in case they need to work with limited staffing resources later in the season.
• We’re focused on providing our customers with what they need, when they need it, using our leading online platform – including e-commerce and other digital capabilities – to facilitate efficient delivery of products, services and solutions. 
• We’re also continuing to provide financial lending to growers: we understand that our scale and financial stability will be critical to helping farming businesses of all sizes weather this storm.

From grower to grocery store, we are all an essential service. We need to work together to ensure the stability of the global food supply chain to feed people now and into the future. Our immediate focus needs to be on getting farmers what they need from products to people. That means finding safe ways to support foreign temporary workers amid travel bans and border closures. Farmers depend on these people to support food production across North America. To keep the food supply chain going, governments also need to continue to allow the trade of goods and services, particularly in Canada as one of the top exporters globally. 

What we are going through right now transcends any one business or any one person. We are all in this together. Let’s take care of each other, and let’s keep talking about what we can do to help.