Our 2030 commitment
By the year 2030, we aim to launch and scale a comprehensive carbon program, empowering growers and our industry to accelerate climate-smart agriculture and soil carbon sequestration while rewarding growers for their efforts.
We are creating a network of growers, suppliers, government and industry players to gather key learnings and scale this important initiative and meet common sustainability goals and objectives.
Our 2022 progress
In 2022, we enabled North American pilots on approximately 685,000 acres, working with growers and collaborating with approximately 10 suppliers and downstream partners. Our whole-acre solutions approach supports a program that aims to be capable of generating high-quality carbon outcomes for both voluntary and regulated carbon markets. Although global carbon markets and protocols for agricultural systems remain immature, through our direct engagement with growers, we have advanced our capabilities to support program expansion and focused on a practical and science-based approach. Our collaboration with growers and value-chain partners will likely remain foundational to our efforts as we continue to build and scale sustainability programming going forward.
Carbon program at a glance
Strong interest has resulted in approximately 685,000 pilot acres across Canada and the U.S.
In 2022, Nutrien continued to advance our programming to generate potential verified carbon offsets and insets.
Our portfolio approach includes 3 Canadian provinces & 20 U.S. states representing a variety of crops, soil types and climate zones.
Our goal is to generate high quality carbon assets that are verifiable based on industry best practices.
Parrott Family Farms has a lot of history. With seven generations of growers and roots dating back to 1842, the farm sits just outside Danville, Iowa. If agriculture has entered a new race for sustainability, Parrott Family Farms is running it hard – and Nutrien is helping them on. Read more here
By leveraging our direct relationship with over 500,000 growers globally, and our industry and execution partners, we will provide year-round agronomic solutions that enable growers to profit from the adoption of sustainable practices.
Agriculture has the potential to be a leading source of carbon assets. By supporting growers to adopt best practices, leverage digital technology (which can measure and analyze impact) and use crop inputs that support sustainability, we can drive emission improvements throughout the entire agricultural value chain. Supporting the development of a carbon credit market to pay growers for every tonne of reduced emissions and sequestered carbon is key to achieving our overall objectives.
Nutrien will look to continue expanding the Carbon Program with a focus on nitrogen management practice improvements and resultant emissions outcomes, continuing to incubate scalable options for soil carbon sequestration, and establishing pilots in North America, South America and Australia.
Key components include:
- Grower engagement:
In 2022, we conducted multiple program pilots in the US and Canada. We also partnered with key accounts to build and scale program functionality through collaboration. Our sustainability solutions pilots began in 2019 and continue to engage growers in determining and incentivizing optimal practices and products. - Digital Hub development:
The Nutrien Ag Solutions Digital Hub includes a grower-specific "toolbox" with features such as a streamlined way to organized important grower-approved and provided data, annual field planning sustainability analytics, carbon outcome measurement and streamlined monetization. - Value chain partner outreach:
We have broad partner outreach with strategic suppliers, downstream partners, NGOs, academic institutions, governments and execution partners. - Methodology:
We primarily use our Agrible sustainability platform to track and measure the results that growers share. Carbon credits will be generated using existing and under development protocols/frameworks to independently verify and validate carbon performance, leveraging proven agronomic modeling and soil sampling methods to generate high-quality credits. - Carbon credit transaction and market:
Our intention is to create high-quality carbon credits that can be monetized in voluntary and compliance markets. The market and protocols for agricultural systems remain immature and we expect to continue our work in 2023 to evolve these protocols following a science-based and practical approach to scale the industry’s positive global impact.
It is possible that Nutrien will purchase carbon credits generated in the program and apply them against our emissions footprint.
For more information on all our sustainability initiatives and results, please see our latest ESG Report.
Join us in feeding the world
No one company, no single government and no standalone framework of regulations can effectively tackle the climate action we need alone. Only by working together can we make the meaningful changes needed to preserve our planet for future generations. Will you join us?