Sustainable Agriculture
Doing our part to improve farming from end to end
Growing for the future
Agriculture might be the most extensive economic activity on the planet. Grazing and cropland use about 38 percent of the earth’s land area, according to the University of Minnesota. Helping make all aspects of agriculture more sustainable will be an essential part of ensuring we can nourish the world tomorrow. This includes more efficient protein production, more precise farm practices to grow the crops that animals eat, and improved livelihoods for the hundreds of millions of people who make a living from agriculture worldwide.
Sustainable business models
Our farmer training programs around the world help small-scale operators improve their livelihoods and strengthen their communities with best practices in animal health and farm management. In India, a program centered on dairy is raising the amount of milk farmers can produce from each cow, often doubling or tripling the number of liters per day. This helps these farmers grow their operations while also meeting skyrocketing demand for dairy in the world’s largest market.
We are also helping farmers get greater production from their animals for every pound of grain, which in turn reduces the footprint of agriculture. Feed efficiency is especially important when finishing pigs. During that part of a hog’s lifecycle, it consumes 70 percent of its total feed. We built an innovative program to improve the feed efficiency and nutrient uptake of finisher pigs, focusing in particular on enzymes. The solution lowers costs for customers and conserves agricultural resources.
We are doing our part to make our own operations more environmentally friendly and energy efficient, too. This includes solutions like installing solar panels at our facility in Amman, Jordan, or using other alternative energy sources that reduce emissions at our plants in Mexico. It also entails smarter sourcing of ingredients through solutions like the Cargill Nutrition System, which helped our tilapia feed facility in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand, receive high marks in an academic study for energy efficiency in feed supply chains.