Nestlé Purina PetCare announced it is working with alongside Land O’Lakes Sustain to support environmental stewardship practices on 50,000 acres of farmland. Company officials say it will drive sustainability in its grains supply chain to the scale of more than 9 million bushels annually over the next two years.
Land O’Lakes Sustain — the sustainability solutions business of Land O’Lakes, Inc. — has developed its Truterra Insights Engine. Land O’Lakes officials say the new initiative will use this tool to help farmers benchmark their current on-farm stewardship practices and identify areas of improvement. Ultimately this aims to help them protect the air, land, and water while keeping farm economics in focus, say company officials.
“We applaud today’s bold commitment by Nestlé Purina to support farmer-led sustainability, harnessing technology to benchmark and build upon farmers’ stewardship achievements and resiliency in the rural economy,” said Matt Carstens, senior vice president of Land O’Lakes Sustain, in a company news release. “This initiative unlocks new capacity for farmers and their trusted ag retail advisers to quantify the benefits of current practices on the farm, and identify potential improvements that balance both environmental benefits and farm economics.”
“Nestlé Purina is proud to support farmers’ leadership on sustainability and we are pleased to launch this major new initiative to bolster stewardship, in a quantifiable way, on farms where we source ingredients for our high-quality dog and cat food products,” said Jack Scott, vice president of sustainability and responsible sourcing for Nestlé Purina, in a company news release. “By utilizing the Truterra Insights Engine to help support sustainable farming, we can help protect the environment for future generations and support their livelihood – a critical driver for the rural economy across America.”
Under the new program, Nestlé Purina is supporting conservation practices on Iowa farms initially, surrounding the company’s Davenport, Iowa, and Clinton, Iowa, production facilities, according to company officials. Working together with local agronomy retailer Innovative Ag Services (IAS), farmers will be able to use the Truterra Insights Engine, a first-of-its-kind, on-farm digital sustainability platform, to benchmark current practices and environmental impact on a field-by-field and acre-by-acre basis.
With this information in hand, farmers will be better able to model both the potential environmental and economic impacts of various conservation practices, according to company officials.
By deploying a metric-based approach to measure stewardship outcomes, the initiative aims to support long-term conservation and productivity on farms and quantify the impact of conservation practices across many areas – nitrogen efficiency, erosion, soil quality, GHG emissions, and carbon sequestration. This announcement closely follows Nestlé’s commitment to climate action and the company joining the ‘One Planet Business for Biodiversity’ (OP2B) coalition dedicated to scaling up regenerative agriculture practices to protect soil health.
“In support of our commitments to climate action and OP2B, it’s critical that we support the farmers in our supply chain with the latest tools and technology to make a scalable difference, and this new collaboration with Land O’Lakes Sustain is a crucial step to helping us achieve that goal,” said Scott in a company news release. “Farmers are leading environmental stewards. With this new commitment to supply chain sustainability, Nestlé Purina looks forward to working in partnership with them to benchmark their great work while helping achieve even more into the future both in the region and industry-wide.”
(Successful Farming)
www.agriculture.com
