Agriculture

Sustainable Solutions

We are a business built on innovation. And year by year, we work hard to bring more sustainable solutions to farmers to help achieve our joint aim of producing not just higher yield, but yield by increasing productivity and profitability while preserving our natural resources.

We are long-term supporters of farmers and farming – with more than 100 years’ experience – and we will continue to invest in a strong R&D pipeline, steered towards ever more sustainable solutions.

What target did we set for ourselves?

What impacts do we aim for?

Increased productivity

Increased profitability

Preserve natural resources

What is our approach?

We developed our Sustainable Solution Steering method to assess our entire product portfolio against clearly defined sustainability criteria. This in turn enables us to actively steer investment in our strong R&D pipeline towards more innovative solutions with a favorable regulatory profile from an early stage. Thereby we ensure that our innovation in crop protection, breeding technologies, trait research, and pheromones and biologicals provides growers with tangible sustainability benefits. The method is unique in the chemical industry, third party certified, and independently audited. It illustrates how we take our non-financial targets as seriously as our financial ones.

Every product in our portfolio is evaluated for its contribution to sustainability in the following eight categories:

TripleS: transparent sustainability for our customers

The TripleS method is spinning for Sustainable-Future Solutions (SFS) by defining the balance between the three dimensions of sustainability - Environment, Society and Economy. We are committed to find sustainable solutions by connecting creative minds while sourcing and producing responsibly.

A two-step process leads to a differentiation of our product portfolio into five sustainability segments (Pioneer, Contributor, Standard, Monitored, Challenged). These five TripleS segments cover the full range of sustainability performance, from solutions with a substantial sustainability contribution, to solutions performing on market standard, to solutions with a significant sustainability concern.

How are the five sustainability segments defined?

BASF’s goal is to have enough segmented products by the end of 2023 to define the new KPI, “Sustainable-Future Solutions” (SFS), which represents the sum of Pioneer and Contributor products.

Find out more about Sustainable Solution Steering at BASF.

Press release: Updated TripleS method published for entire BASF product portfolio

Read more

This is where we stand now

In 2021, BASF generated sales of €24.1 billion with Accelerator products (2020: €16.7 billion) – already reaching our targeted €22 billion in Accelerator sales by 2025. In Agricultural Solutions we have also overperformed on our 2021 target.
We will continue along the same lines, ensuring our target is also met in the upcoming years and gradually moving our portfolio towards more Sustainable Solutions.
The new TripleS methodology will be applied in Agricultural Solutions as in all other BASF divisions to segment its portfolio until the end of 2023.