Tate & Lyle: Lessons on Scaling a Regenerative Agriculture Programme

Drivers behind climate action in food and drink

Most leading food and drink producers, when building out their sustainability strategies, recognize that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their supply chain (Scope 3 emissions) and safeguarding precious natural resources will make the biggest positive impact. Their ability to meet the high environmental standards increasingly demanded by their consumers, employees and investors, alongside regulatory bodies, is, in no small part, contingent on their supplier's understanding and reducing their environmental impact. The need for supply chain transparency and collaboration has never been greater, nor have the expectations of companies been higher.

The role of the ingredient supplier 

For Tate & Lyle, as a leading ingredient solutions provider, partnering with our customers isn’t just about meeting their ingredient needs, but also enabling them to be successful in their climate ambitions. As a supplier, we play a key role in connecting our customers to growers through sustainable agriculture partnerships and working together to develop and share more accurate supply chain emissions data. 

In our case, reducing the environmental impact of farming our two main raw materials – corn and stevia – represents our biggest opportunity to deliver on our science-based Scope 3 emissions commitment. In turn, by helping customers gain visibility of the carbon footprint of the ingredients they use in their cereal bars, yoghurts or sauces, we can help them build an informed picture of their carbon footprint and create opportunities for them to meet their climate goals.

Our solutions for sustainable agriculture

At Tate & Lyle, in line with our purpose, we are big believers in the role that science and technology will play in finding solutions that address society’s biggest challenges. That’s the mentality we apply in developing our ingredient portfolio of sweeteners, texturants, dietary fibres, and plant-based protein that we use to make food healthier and tastier, and it’s at the heart of how we approach regenerative agriculture.

In 2018, we established a sustainable agriculture program for corn in partnership with Truterra LLC, the sustainability business of Land O’Lakes and a leading U.S. resource stewardship solutions provider. What started as a pilot to trial a new approach to support U.S. corn growers to accelerate the adoption of more sustainable conservation practices, went on to become the largest continuous improvement sustainable agriculture project in the U.S., as recognised by Field to Market, and it still is.

At launch, we enrolled in the program - and maintain to this day - the equivalent of 100% of the corn we procured to make our ingredients and gave participating growers access to cutting-edge precision ag-tech, the Truterra™ Insights Engine. This software, delivered in collaboration with their trusted agronomic advisors, enables them to fully understand the impact of the changes they are making acre-by-acre.

The program’s strength is its ability to enable targeted interventions so growers can make smart choices to improve soil health, alongside unlocking a host of other benefits. Crucially, with this industry-first approach, this technology and the huge data set it collected gave us a picture of the changes we were helping to drive acre-by-acre, and so offer our most sustainability-minded customers the ability to meet their sustainability ambitions and ESG reporting needs. Our latest results show good progress on the program’s retained acres - 1.09 million acres, representing 1,400 growers. We have helped growers reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5%, soil quality has also improved by 2%, as measured by the Soil Conditioning Index, and wind erosion was reduced by 64%.

Supporting an agricultural sector in its infancy

In parallel to the program for corn, we also established a science-focused sustainable agriculture program in China for growers of stevia. Stevia is a plant with sweet-tasting leaves, and as the global leader in low- and no-calorie sweeteners, we extract the sweet parts of the leaf to create our portfolio of stevia ingredients. 

The stevia sector has been active in China, where most of the world’s stevia is grown, for less than half a century, which is in stark contrast to corn, which has been grown for more than ten thousand years. With this comparative infancy comes a significant opportunity to develop and embed regenerative agronomic best practices and ensure the industry, farmers and local communities that rely on it thrive.

Working with environmental charity Earthwatch Europe and Nanjing Agricultural University in Eastern China, we have taken a phased approach to building an understanding of the specific environmental impacts of stevia cultivation in different growing regions in China. Our stevia life-cycle-analysis in 2019 collected data from 29 stevia farms in China assessing 73 variables including soil health, farming practices, yield and farmer profiles.

In Dongtai, Jiangsu Province, East China, an area where Tate & Lyle sources stevia, we found that stevia growers tend to operate small-scale farms growing a variety of crops, have a female bias, and use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. 

The pilot that followed demonstrated that slow-release fertilizers present farmers with the opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting the number of applications and total quantity of fertilizer used. A reduction of 60–80% in fertilizer and fertilizer optimization was found to provide not only environmental but also productivity benefits.

Following the successful pilot, which showed recommended changes delivering positive results across all nine environmental categories measured against a baseline, we have since expanded our program in Dongtai. Through workshops and on-farm support, growers have been upskilled around the targeted use of slow-release fertilizers, as well as conducting and interpreting soil and water samples. Building understanding around soil health is critical to helping growers make informed decisions on the farm to ensure a more successful crop and minimize environmental impact. 

Lessons on sustainable agriculture partnerships 

With a retention rate of 73% in the U.S. corn program, we know that participating farmers see value in a sustainability data-driven approach and the benefits it offers to build a more sustainable future for their farms. With a program of this scale, inevitably it takes time to move the needle on emissions, but we are pleased that since its launch it has made steady progress across most environmental indicators. Importantly, we have made sure to move at a pace that suits participating growers and recognizes the wider environment they operate in, including the many challenges posed by the pandemic.

In China, our relationships with the farmer community have deepened over time and farmer feedback shows that taking time to meet them where they are and bring them on this journey with us has been the right approach. While we are still assessing the results of our expanded program, the initial findings indicate significant positive environmental and productivity benefits. One farmer participant sharing her experiences at our farmer workshop in February explained how using more sustainable slow-release fertilizer in a more targeted way has reduced her fertilizer and time costs while increasing stevia leaf yield by around 6%. 

We are delighted that our efforts in both programs to date have helped demonstrate to our supply chain partners the productivity and economic gains they can access through more sustainable practices.