2030 commitment
Enable growers to adopt sustainable and productive agricultural products and practices on 75 million acres globally, by 2030.
Our 2023 progress
We measured, documented and calculated outcomes on 2 million sustainably engaged acres in North America, South America and Australia by leveraging our digital platforms, including Agrible®, to track and measure factors such as crop quality, soil health, GHG emissions, water quality and biodiversity. Our efforts to date have focused on the development of financially attractive sustainability programming and solutions for our grower customers, which includes capabilities to support grower onboarding, data management, and environmental performance measurement and verification. Our ability to reach our long-term commitment is dependent upon grower participation in these initiatives, emphasizing the importance of continued industry collaboration and engagement on the topic of sustainability.
Our programs
Nutrien’s sustainable agriculture programs are designed to leverage our position as the world’s largest provider of crop inputs and services. Whether they are related to carbon, water or biodiversity, our grower programs are centered on two key features. The first is our ability to drive change through the incentivization and adoption of best management and sustainable practices throughout the agricultural value chain. The second is our role as an intermediary and facilitator, connecting growers to downstream value-chain partners.
Benefits
Together with our program partners, we can build on and scale growers’ existing efforts. There are many environmental benefits of connecting growers with downstream value-chain partners, environmental groups and regional partners, which include: improving soil health, optimizing nutrient-use efficiency, reducing GHG emissions, increasing soil organic carbon sequestration and expanding the protection of existing carbon sinks, improving water quality and soil water retention, conserving and improving biodiversity by increasing crop yields, building soil organic matter, enhancing nutrient recycling and reducing land conversion.
For growers, our programs offer an opportunity to expand on current stewardship practices, differentiate their product and potentially add a new revenue stream to their operations. Growers can sign up for our Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes program in Canada here and the US here.
For Nutrien, our programs are an opportunity to amplify and document the value of sustainable agricultural practices.
Two types of programs
- Measuring outcomes from current practices: Many growers had long-standing sustainable agricultural practices in their operations but lacked a way to demonstrate their value. We use our digital platforms, such as Agrible®, to measure baseline and intervention outcomes of sustainable practices at the farm level and help growers document the environmental and economic value of these existing practices using key metrics from recognized global standards.
- Measuring outcomes from sustainable interventions: In addition to measuring outcomes from current agricultural practices, our agronomic field teams are working with some growers to improve their environmental performance by recommending whole-acre solutions, tracking improvements from baseline performance, and connecting them with downstream certification bodies and customers. Learn more here
Vision
Our vision for the sustainable agriculture programs, once fully operational, is to generate long-term value for growers by making each acre more profitable as a result of more sustainable farming practices. It also offers Nutrien and our value-chain collaborators the opportunity to reduce a source of Scope 3 emissions, while maintaining crop production and quality, and supporting global food security.
We define “sustainably engaged acres” as acres that participate in programs that track field-level data that is, or can be, analyzed for sustainability metrics and/ or acres that participate in sustainable agriproducts programs that incentivize growers to adopt additional sustainable products and practices resulting in quantifiable, incremental benefits that may be verified and used for reporting purposes.
