Working together for sustainable seed production
‘Living labs’ aim to provide on-farm solutions to growers.
Some things are so urgent that they force people to put aside their competitive instincts and instead knuckle down and work together.
Our changing climate is one of them.
With far-reaching consequences for global populations, affecting everything from sea levels and weather patterns to food security and health, it is crucial we adapt.
The agriculture sector, like all others, needs to dramatically reduce its environmental impact to safeguard our natural resources.
By embracing innovation and practices that promote sustainability, agriculture can help secure food supplies for future generations while contributing to broader climate resilience.
But making real change requires the energy and resources of more than just one company. It needs to be sector-wide, bringing together competitors to collaborate for the greater benefit of growers.
And it needs to offer practical solutions, backed by measurable results, to get grower buy-in.
So, a partnership that sees competing industry players work together, to reduce the environmental impact of an entire sector, is no mean feat.
A project called Fieldlab Seedshift, based in the Netherlands, is an example of such a partnership.
It’s an effort that began a year ago with six vegetable seed companies and one clear aim: make seed production more sustainable.
While that aim sounds simple, the reality is much more complex, because seeds are not produced in a factory with controllable factors, but are actually grown in fields.
Finding real-world practical solutions that reduce the environmental impact of seed production, the Seedshift initiative will then share these alternatives with farmers.
But first: how did six major industry players, competitors even, find common ground for this partnership?
It was the collective agreement between companies - Syngenta, Rijk Zwaan, Enza Zaden, SESVanderHave, Vikima Seed and Jensen Seeds - that the seed industry needed to move faster on sustainability, and that working together could accelerate progress.
Gustavo Ramirez, Syngenta’s Lead for Vegetables Field Production Research in Europe and Africa, says while sustainability is integral to the company, it can be hard to incorporate this across an entire food chain.
“Working together, we saw that the other companies were facing similar challenges,” he says.
“Some people were scratching their heads – how do we do this? So, we thought, why don’t we just approach this challenge as a sector? We are competitors, of course. But in this case, we are not competing, we are finding solutions.”
Farmer-focused solutions
And so, just over a year ago, Fieldlab Seedshift was formed.
Now, cross-company teams run trials in so-called ‘living labs’ focusing on three areas: herbicide-free weed control, healthy soils, and fertilization.
Trials are now underway on spinach, sugar beet and cauliflower crops in the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.
By changing the inputs and growing crops using different methods, the aim is to find practical solutions that growers can build into their existing practices.
“At the core of these field trials is that we want to provide solutions that are implementable,” Ramirez says.
An example of this is the ‘living lab’ nitrogen trial, which involves using different nitrogen inputs to grow healthy crops. They’re trying to understand just how these crops can be grown with consistently high-quality yields despite lower levels of nitrogen fertilizer.
And the team plans to share the results with farmers, so they can implement them on their farms.
It’s the first of many planned trials from the partnership. While only in its first year, Ramirez says the spirit of collaboration at the core of the work is already making a difference.
“We have a broader community of expertise and resources by working together,” he says.
“So in the end, the amount of knowledge and expertise that you can generate increases significantly.”
Pooling together labor-intensive trials with industry experts can also speed up the time between the discovery of practical solutions and getting the word out to growers.
Syngenta’s Field Production Lead for Vegetable Seeds in the Netherlands, Wouter Meijerink, says in this way, collaboration can breed innovation – faster.
“While each company will have its own way of working, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel on these topics,” he says, adding that many of the findings will be useful across multiple crops.
“Even if we are not involved in every trial, we all benefit from each project because instead of two companies running projects themselves, we are running them in parallel.”
Regenerative agriculture practices such as cover cropping are utilized in the trials.
Regenerative agriculture practices such as cover cropping are utilized in the trials.
Team manually harvesting part of a nitrogen fertilization trial in a spinach crop.
Team manually harvesting part of a nitrogen fertilization trial in a spinach crop.
A year in, the commitment to making seed production more sustainable reflects the ongoing work of Syngenta Group, which this year released its sustainability priorities as a roadmap for curbing its emissions.
This project is the perfect example of how the organization embeds sustainability into its business and supports growers in the field.
And it reflects the commitment of the agriculture sector itself to do better, where it can.
Increasingly, farmers are taking a holistic approach – from soil health management practices to reducing or minimizing inputs, to using biological alternatives. But they need science-backed practices to help them grow healthy, sustainable crops.
“As an industry, we are already looking to a different view, a more holistic view, around crop protection,” Meijerink says.
He compares it to human health: “When you’re sick, do you go to a pharmacy and get medication, or can you try to prevent this? If we think of crop protection as the medicine, how can we minimize its use, or add supplements that strengthen soil and plant health in the first place?”
That’s exactly what the Seedshift partnership is working to discover.
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