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At Bayer, breeding with a laser focus on sustainability proves a powerful combination

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From wild weather to water shortages to disease pressure, the pain points of farming are felt by growers around the globe. When it comes to offering growers sustainable solutions to address these challenges, one company says it all starts with seeds.

“I think a lot of people don’t see seeds as one of the key innovations in climate adaptation, disease resistance and water scarcity,” Cristiane Lourenço, global sustainability director for Bayer Vegetable Seeds, told The Packer. “But by selecting the right seed or using technology to select the right variety, we can help to address a lot of areas for growers.

“That’s our mission,” Lourenço continued. “Through innovation, starting with seed selection, we can help growers to not only address the challenges we have today in terms of sustainability, but also to adapt to new climate conditions.”


Like a growing number of companies, the Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer has been working to operate more sustainably for years.

“We are looking to reduce our impact and our carbon footprint,” Lourenço said. “We have clear goals to go net zero by 2050. We also have clear goals around water. We are working to make sure our operations — the way we produce our products — is done in a sustainable way.”

But Lourenço says that’s just one side of Bayer’s sustainability story.


Whether through seed innovation and selection, crop protection and rotation or tapping into its digital platform, Bayer works with growers around the world to help them reduce their carbon emissions and minimize the amount of water and fertilizer used — all while maintaining the same yields — and meeting their own sustainability goals, Lourenço says.


Water challenges

On the breeding innovation front, Bayer also works to tackle the specific sustainability challenges that growers have based on locale.

In California, that means water scarcity.


“With the water shortage that growers in California face now, we have seen processing tomato growers that have stopped growing tomatoes and have moved to other crops that use less water. But this is very costly for growers,” Lourenço said. “So, we are looking at how we can bring seeds to market that can enable growers to keep the same quality, same yields, same disease resistance, but at the same time enable them to irrigate less.”

Yields, disease resistance and quality are the non-negotiables for any seed Bayer brings to market, Lourenço adds.

At Bayer’s Vegetables Research and Development site in Woodland, Calif., the team is conducting a number of trials comparing the water needs of different tomato seeds and plants the company already has in the market with tomato seeds and plants that it may add to its portfolio.

From these seed trials, Bayer says it identified a tomato plant that delivers the same quality and yield using 50% less water from irrigation.

“Those seeds aren’t commercial yet — we’re still in the test and learn space, but I think this is a great example of how genetics can help with sustainability,” Lourenço said.

Bayer says it plans to roll out similar trials in other areas facing water scarcity, including Spain, Italy and Portugal.

“We need to work with growers to do these trials in their environment,” she said. “Because it’s one thing to trial at the field in the station, and it’s another thing when farmers grow for production in their own fields.

“The problems growers have today are global,” Lourenço continued. “There is a water problem. Some growers are facing it more than others, but we know the water problem is going to get worse. So, we need to support growers to adapt, because what we’re really talking about is climate adaptation and finding solutions that can be tailored to local climate conditions.”


Cap
Cap (Photo courtesy of Bayer Vegetable Seeds)



Regenerative agriculture

Last year, Bayer broadened its scope beyond sustainability, launching what Lourenço calls a “long-term vision connected to regenerative agriculture” for both professional and small farmers.

“Our approach involves offering innovative solutions that scale regenerative agriculture, with the ambition to expand our footprint to reach 400 million acres by 2035,” she said.

In trials, Bayer says it has seen that a holistic, regenerative approach to farming, including practices such as reduced tillage, cover cropping, creating habitats for pollinators and beneficial insects, companion cropping for integrated pest management as well as modern irrigation systems and fertilization, can yield important results.

“With regenerative agriculture, we are talking not only about minimizing the impact of the production, but also working with nature, with what you have there already — using the soil and nature to restore the land,” Lourenço said. “We’re looking at how we can help growers maximize what they’re already doing with soil health, biodiversity and even water use to offer solutions that help them minimize their impact while working with nature.

“We are moving to more of this ecosystem approach and vision toward regenerative agriculture when it comes to how our solutions need to be bred, how we need to think about the seed in that context, and really looking at a holistic approach for growers,” she added.


Supporting smallhold farmers

As part of Bayer’s 2030 sustainability commitments, the company has an ambitious social goal to empower 100 million smallholder farmers by providing access to its solutions.

“Both smallholders and professional growers are integral to our goal of producing more, restoring nature and scaling regenerative agriculture,” says Lourenço, who adds that smallhold farmers often face their own set of challenges, specifically access to innovation.

“There’s unique complexities with smallholders,” Lourenço said. “They need to be very precise about what they’re going to invest in because they don’t have much room to fail.”

Bayer’s work in India with tomato and cucumber growers is one example of the successful union of smallhold farming and regenerative ag.

“In India, we saw some tomato and cucumber growers were having a lot of problems in terms of disease and were losing a lot of their production as a result,” she said.

The Vegetables by Bayer team in India worked with 5,000 smallhold farmers facing these disease problems to implement crop rotation with the Moraleda pole bean variety. Bayer educated the farmers about the benefits of intercropping with leguminous crops, helping them to enhance their soil health, increase their yields and livelihoods with minimal additional cost.

Lourenço says the green beans became an extra source of revenue as well as an opportunity to maximize the nitrogen fixation in the soil, which also helped strengthen the yields of the in-demand crops.


Looking ahead

While Bayer continues to customize innovation based on the grower’s specific needs, it also seeks to anticipate what the pain points will be down the line related to climate change adaptation and adoption of regenerative agriculture, says Lourenço.

“It takes five to 10 years to bring a new innovation to the market,” she said. “Maybe today my customer isn’t telling me there’s a heat problem, but we know from the data that heat waves are coming in 10 years.”

Bayer’s strategic marketing teams analyze the data that’s available today to determine, for example, what the California climate is going to look like in 10 years.

Ultimately, Bayer’s sustainability vision is broadening to bring solutions to market that not only help the grower to produce much more with less, but also restore the land.


Source: The Packer