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 better yield by increasing productivity and profitability and 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?
What impacts do we aim for?
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:
Sustainable Solution Steering - Different Categories of Sustainablity Contribution
Having already classified a large portion of our portfolio, over 2021 we carried out thorough analyses to segment the entirety of our Seeds & Traits and Vegetable Seeds portfolios according to our sustainability criteria. We deem these fundamental areas of innovation and crucial components of the climate-smart portfolio with which we support farmers. As farmers increasingly implement intricate, resilient cropping systems to combat and mitigate climate change while meeting production demand, we constantly work to enrich our offering with the likes of crop seed traits favoring characteristics such as, for instance, intrinsic yield, resistance to diseases and pests, abiotic stress tolerance, lower water and energy consumption per ton of produce, and lower CO2e emissions.
