By Cecilia Smith, Administrative Assistant, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
How can the agricultural industry mitigate emissions while simultaneously increasing production by nearly 50% to meet increasing worldwide demand? The global agriculture industry is tasked with this fundamental challenge to address increasing food demand arising from population growth. Incentive programs for efficient farming practices, innovations in crop protection science, biological solutions, and effective data collection—strategies implemented by agriculture companies like Nutrien and Corteva Agriscience—can help the industry maximize efficiency and make progress towards this global need.
As the worldwide population is expected to increase from a little over 8 billion in 2025 to 9.75 billion people in 2050, the USDA predicts that global agricultural production would need to increase to 14,060 trillion crop calories to feed the global population, a 47-percent increase in crop calories from 2011. The United Nations highlights this challenge in their Sustainable Development Goal #2: Zero Hunger, and projects that more than 600 million people worldwide will be facing hunger in 2030 if production proceeds at its current pace. To address this crucial worldwide goal, it’s clear that the agriculture sector must increase output and embrace innovative solutions.
A Systems Approach: Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes
Experts in the industry have adopted various programs and new technologies to decrease chemical use and lessen environmental impact. As nitrogen fertilizer is a primary crop nutrient used extensively in agriculture, it has become an important factor in many efficiency initiatives. One such example is an incentive program used by Nutrien, a leading global crop inputs and services company, which provides growers with financial compensation for improving their nitrogen use efficiency. The Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes program offers compensation for growers on a per acre basis when they reduce applied nitrogen by a minimum of 5% and provide Nutrien with specific data on their crops and yields.
Sally Flis, Director of Sustainable Ag Programs at Nutrien, describes how the program encourages growers to think about fertilizer use in a more holistic way by targeting the Four R’s of nutrient management: right source, right rate, right time, and right placement of fertilizer.
“The Four R’s are really trying to get agriculture stakeholders to think about all of the factors that impact fertilizer application, instead of focusing just on rate,” says Flis.
From a sustainability standpoint it may seem like reducing the rate of nitrogen-based fertilizer use is the most environmentally beneficial option, but this isn’t always the case. A decrease in nitrogen fertilizer use that results in a much lower yield can lead to an overall increase in emissions for that amount of crops. Inversely, using much more nitrogen than needed to ensure a high yield of crops introduces excess nitrogen emissions. By using crop consultants who work with growers individually, Nutrien tailors its Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes Program to meet individual farms’ needs, taking into consideration growers’ specific crop history and goals. Flis states that this process “helps growers focus on the whole system instead of thinking only about fertilizer use rate and assuming that changing just the rate will reduce emissions.” At the end of the day, the program’s aim is to increase efficiency. “Our goal is that on every acre where this program is implemented, we assist the grower to increase yield with less inputs than they previously applied.”
Taking a holistic, systemic approach to efficient farming practices also means providing meaningful and impactful incentives for individual farmers to drive widespread adoption of these practices. As with many industries, it can be challenging to convince stakeholders to change their processes, and many growers express concern about yield loss when using less fertilizer, meaning financial incentives for growers enrolled in the program are crucial. Additionally, Flis states that, “it takes time and effort from the growers to collect the right data needed for the program that then must be verified, analyzed, and reported. It’s important to have an incentive that’s meaningful to growers.”
Farmer Focused Solutions
Like Nutrien, Corteva Agriscience sees the importance of centering growers and farmers when developing sustainable alternatives to current agricultural practices. Corteva Agriscience, an agricultural and seed company that has won six Green Chemistry Challenge Awards, creates new fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, and seed treatments that aim to increase crop yield while minimizing environmental impact. Ashish Batra, Corteva’s Vice President of Crop Health R&D, states that, “Corteva’s innovation process really starts with the farmer focus. We ask, ‘What is the problem that they have that we can solve?’” Corteva then uses 12 sustainable innovation criteria, which align with 5 of the U.N. SDGs, to develop new technology and chemistry to solve that problem.
Like Nutrien’s Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes Program, one of Corteva’s products aims to target nitrogen use, but through a different strategy. Utrisha™ N is a biological compound launched by Corteva which is based on the endophytic bacterium Methylobacterium symbioticum, which works with the plant to secure needed nitrogen from the atmosphere by enhancing nitrogen use efficiency. This unique biological product acts as a supplemental source of nitrogen for crops in addition to synthetic fertilizers. It provides nitrogen to the plant throughout the growing season and enhances yield for farmers without any additional synthetic nitrogen than their standard practice. In Brazil, farmers have seen roughly a 4.4 bushels per acre advantage using Utrisha™ N as a supplemental source of nitrogen in corn, and about a 2.6 bushels per acre increase in soybeans.
Barriers & Drivers to Change
Despite these advancements, there are a number of obstacles to widespread implementation of efficiency practices, such as a lack of cooperation between stakeholders. Flis states that when beginning to work with new growers for the Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes program, it’s important to understand where growers are starting from to figure out the best strategy for increasing efficiency and production gains per acre. Large surveys on grower practices range from 10-20 years old, and current programs for collecting public grower data are slow, meaning the data can be out of date by the time it’s published.
“Enhancing government data collection protocols and establishing a centralized public dataset could greatly assist companies in setting accurate baselines,” says Flis. “Data accessibility should foster collaboration rather than competition.”
Additionally, implementation of new products and processes is often slow. For Corteva, developing a new crop protection chemistry takes roughly 12 years from discovery to launch of the product. For Nutrien, while they have successfully created a unique pathway for growers from initial sign-on to implementation, the current timeframes for data collection, verification, validation, and monetization present opportunities for refinement. This reflects the continuous journey towards optimizing the efficiency of these processes.
When it comes to motivating change in existing practices, performance ultimately drives change more quickly.
“At the end of the day, farmers really don't care about products themselves,” says Batra. “They care about performance. If you were to ask a farmer, ‘Will you buy a more sustainable product?’ the answer will be, ‘What does the product do for me?’ Farmers are the original stewards of the land, so they want to ensure that they are doing everything they can to continue to have healthy land that generates healthy crops generation after generation.”
To address increasing global food demand, the agriculture industry therefore needs to pair scientific advancements in performance with meaningful incentives for local growers and stakeholders to implement those advancements. The development of crop protection technologies, biological solutions, and nitrogen management plans represent important steps towards improvement. However, the agriculture industry and regulatory stakeholders must work to incentivize adoption of these technologies for them to create positive outcomes.
Reflecting on the progress the agriculture industry has made—and the innovations that lie ahead—Batra says, “Sustainability is relative, not absolute. If you can’t focus on improving the sustainability of all aspects of a product, focus on one or two things to improve so that the next generation of products is better than the first. Sustainability is a continuous improvement journey.”
For the agriculture industry to help prevent increased food scarcity, farmers, researchers, and government and industry partners must all embrace this mindset.