Regenerative agriculture is about risk and resilience, sustainability leader says

To “keep farmers farming” is the overarching goal for PepsiCo’s push for regenerative agriculture practices, Margaret Henry said at The Packer’s Sustainable Produce Summit.

Henry, director of sustainable agriculture at the company, was the keynote speaker Sept. 15 in the certifications/operations track of the virtual event.

Henry, born on a dairy farm in Kentucky, earned a BA and BS from Brown University, training from Massachusetts Institute for Technology in system dynamics, and a master’s degree from Princeton University focused on science, technology and environmental policy. She has been with PepsiCo for about five years.

PepsiCo, the second biggest beverage company in the world, started its sustainable farming program in 2015, she said, working with farmers from 60 countries where the company sources about 25 major farm commodities. That list of commodities includes corn, potatoes, oranges, sugarcane, soy oil, palm oil and others.

Henry said she manages all things sustainability-related that have to do with the company’s supply chain, from human rights and social concerns to climate change and resilience for growers.

Evolution 

While PepsiCo’s attention to farming and manufacturing efficiencies began decades ago, that has evolved to the whole supply chain.

“For the past 10 years, we’ve been really focused on our supply chains as well and understanding the products that come into our facilities and how we work in partnership with our farmers and our suppliers,” Henry said. 

She said the company thinks of products in terms of environmental and social questions and concerns “all the way back to the farm, all the way back to the seed production, all the way back to the fertilizer production.”

The company has thousands of contracts directly with farmers all over world, she said, noting 25,000 PepsiCo contract growers in India alone. 

In addition, the company employs hundreds of agronomists to work with growers all over the world.

The many relationships with growers ensure that the farmer voice is front and center in PepsiCo’s thinking about supply chain sustainability, Henry said.

“We’re really proud of our relationship with our farmers more than anything in this sustainability journey, that we built it together,” she said. “We consider ourselves an agricultural company first.”

Regenerative push

Henry said the push for regenerative agriculture is tied to extreme weather events and climate-related challenges growers are facing.

“It’s affecting farmers, it’s affecting the ability to produce food, and we rely on those products to make the food that we bring to your table,” she said. 

“We have to work with farmers, we can’t just expect that we’ll always have corn somewhere, we’ll always have the perfect potato coming from somewhere. That’s not a mindset that’s actually going to work into the future and we know it.”

She said the company views regenerative agriculture practices from a “risk and resilience lens.”

“Our goal is to keep farmers farming,” she said. That is behind the company’s thinking about regenerative agriculture, to help growers stay on their farms and withstand extreme weather events through farming practices and improved varieties.

Henry said there are many definitions of regenerative agriculture.

“Some people are trying to build certifications; we are really approaching it from an impact perspective,” she said. “What can we prove that matters?”

The company isn’t necessarily looking to put a label on it, she said. 

“This is not a marketing play for us; what we’re looking to do is really make sure we’re moving things in the right direction,” Henry said. 

The pillars of regenerative agriculture are soil health, greenhouse gas reduction and sequestration, watershed health, biodiversity and livelihood, she said. 

“We think that livelihood to the farmer is front and center,” she said. “In everything that we’re doing, we’re thinking about the livelihood impact (to growers),” she said, adding that new practices and technologies at the farm level are subject to a cost benefit analysis.

In some cases, PepsiCo may cost share with growers on certain practices. 

Measuring soil health and greenhouse gases is challenging.

Measuring the impact is both the “biggest growth area” and the “biggest gap” right now, she said. 

At the same time PepsiCo doesn’t want to bother growers with the “17th” tool to enter all their production data, the company and its stakeholders do want credibility for what it commits to, she said.

“We are trying to walk that middle line between excessive data gathering and sufficient rigor, to really be confident in what we’re saying,” she said.

Henry believes that has been big progress made in the past few years.

“We’ve seen in particular potato farmers, but really all of our farmers, take so much more of a careful look at their inputs and their outputs and their farming operations over the past decade,” Henry said, noting the importance of technology to track metrics. 

“But it’s been really incredible to see some of the progress that they’ve been making in their own management and their management decisions.”