Nestlé Purina PetCare today announced a new commitment to support environmental stewardship practices on 50,000 acres of farmland, driving sustainability in its grains supply chain to the scale of more than 9 million bushels annually over the next two years. The company will work alongside Land O'Lakes SUSTAIN, the sustainability solutions business of Land O'Lakes, Inc., one of America's largest farmer-owned cooperatives. Using world-class technology — the Truterra™ Insights Engine™, a leading on-farm conservation management platform—the new initiative will 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.
"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. "This initiative unlocks new capacity for farmers and their trusted ag retail advisors 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. "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. 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.
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. "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."
To learn more about the Truterra Insights Engine, visit: www.truterrainsights.com.
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Nestlé
Published Nov 13, 2019 9am EST / 6am PST / 2pm GMT / 3pm CET