ROYAL CANIN®, Mars, Incorporated’s largest brand, has begun a new collaboration with Soil Capital, an established agronomy company, which motivates, trains and helps reward farmers to implement climate-smart practices that lower carbon emissions through sequestration and reduction. These practices also aim to improve soil health, water and climate resilience as well as biodiversity.
Through this collaboration, ROYAL CANIN® aims to engage, train, and financially support farmers and farming cooperatives in its supply chain to adopt regenerative agriculture practices on up to 300,000 hectares of farmland – an area larger than Luxemburg. The collaboration is expected to deliver an estimated 150,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas removals and reductions on average, each year – the equivalent of taking 30,000 cars off the road for a year.
Commencing this year, the collaboration will initially focus on supporting close to 250 farmers with the transition to regenerative practices. Soil Capital and ROYAL CANIN® will work collaboratively to drive meaningful scale, beginning in France and Belgium, followed by expansion into other European countries. Similar collaborations are also being developed by ROYAL CANIN® in North America and being explored in Latin America and Asia.
The investment made by ROYAL CANIN® via the Soil Capital collaboration demonstrates progress towards the Mars Incorporated Sustainable in a Generation Plan, which seeks to achieve Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions across its full value chain by 2050.
Discussing the collaboration, Cécile Coutens, Global President at Royal Canin said: “Transformation of today’s agricultural systems and global supply chains is critical to tackling the climate emergency. Farming in a different, regenerative way is one of the tools we must use to both reduce emissions and improve livelihoods for the farmers in our supply chains.
“To achieve our Net Zero commitments and protect the health of our planet it is critical that we collaborate closely with farmers and support them to transition to climate smart and regenerative agriculture. ROYAL CANIN®’s collaboration with Soil Capital is an example of one of the many practical initiatives in action, which will make a huge difference to farmers and ultimately, help create a healthy planet where both people and pets can thrive.”
Discussing the collaboration, Chuck de Liedekerke, CEO at Soil Capital said: “In order to drive the necessary transition to regenerative agricultural practices, farmers need to be both motivated and incentivized to change the way they farm. ROYAL CANIN®’s latest initiative represents an important step in ensuring that farmers are supported to make this shift, in a way that succeeds in improving soil health and storing carbon.”
This collaboration forms part of wider activity at Mars to strengthen its programs with farmers and drive the transition towards climate smart and regenerative agriculture. In addition to this work, Mars will be working with farmers and suppliers to promote improved agricultural practices and sustainable land use, and to support research into the development of resilient and higher yielding crops to help protect against the impacts of climate change. The collaboration with Soil Capital and Royal Canin follows Mars Incorporated’s leadership role in establishing the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) Agribusiness Taskforce.
