Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative agriculture is increasingly regarded as a valuable approach to farming that supports long-term adaptation to climate variability.

With climate challenges affecting crops and farmer livelihoods worldwide, the long-term resilience of global food and agricultural supply chains requires a transition to sustainable practices where the food system begins – at farm level.

At LDC, our ambition is to be at the forefront of the transition to regenerative agriculture practices that help future-proof agronomic systems, reducing agricultural emissions, conserving natural resources and preserving ecosystems, while enhancing the climate resilience and welfare of farming communities connected with LDC’s supply chains.

What is Regenerative Agriculture?

The term ‘regenerative agriculture’ refers to a range of farming practices that seek to simultaneously reduce carbon emissions and improve the soil ecosystem. Healthy soils store carbon and increase resilience to climate impacts, such as drought and heat, with benefits for both farmers and the environment.

Our Ambition

This ambitious goal is testament to LDC’s ongoing commitment to reducing its Scope 3 (indirect) emissions, and conserving and enhancing biodiversity in its supply chains, while enabling food and agriculture value chain customers to source ingredients produced through sustainable and regenerative practices.

Interest is growing across the entire agriculture value chain to accelerate the transition to regenerative agriculture, for which collaborative investment and operational cooperation are key. As a leading global merchant of agricultural goods, LDC is ideally positioned to drive multi-stakeholder collaboration toward more resilient, future-proofed agronomic systems, with robust ESG impacts across our supply chains.

Our Approach

As members of the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform, we endorse the SAI Regenerative Together framework in our regenerative agriculture metrics monitoring and reporting systems to achieve measurable outcomes.

Regenerative agriculture represents a set of farming practices that are locally relevant and adapted to individual farming systems that focus on the restoration of ecosystem services provided by healthy soils and biodiverse farming systems.

The Six Principles of Regenerative Agriculture

Our Strategy

Our regenerative agriculture strategy focuses on supporting farmers in our key supply sheds with the implementation of regenerative agriculture practices. It aims to scale-up swift, beyond-pilot initiatives, while we co-design and implement landscape-level projects with our partners.

This approach is built around two pillars:

Supporting Farmers

Building on our long-standing partnerships with farmers, we support them to implement local regenerative agriculture transition plans.

Each farm is different, with specific farming and climate conditions, including variables such as precipitation, temperature, soil type, market opportunities for cover crops, access to biological products, investment capital, machineries and labor availability.

We understand that the challenges faced by farmers are therefore unique, which is why we co-design programs that align with local realities and ensure at-scale impact.

Our tailor-made value propositions for farmers include financial incentives, hands-on training on regenerative practices, peer-to-peer knowledge exchange, methods for measuring impact, support to adopt more sustainable farming inputs, and access to efficient data collection systems.

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Leveraging Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration

We leverage multi-stakeholder collaboration to reach scale in deploying regenerative agriculture practices across our key supply sheds.

Our strategic position in the value chain allows us to connect supply chain actors and foster collaboration to advance the transition to regenerative agriculture.

We identify priority landscapes where actors such as regional governments, investors, retailers and customers have mutual interests and complementary sourcing needs, and facilitate connections among value chain stakeholders toward common regenerative agriculture goals.

We also partner with expert organizations such as The Nature Conservancy to deliver regenerative agriculture programs that benefit farmers, society and our planet.

We leverage collaboration across sectors and value chains to maximize support to farmers transitioning to sustainable practices, ultimately driving increased profitability and positive environmental services across supply chains.