Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming that maintains and even enhances nature. Much of the pioneering work on it has happened on small farms, often set in opposition to ‘big ag’. But to really make a difference, regenerative agriculture needs to be practiced at large scale and the big boys need to learn from it too. So I was interested to find out that the global fruit company Fyffes have set out a plan around sustainable farming.
Their goal is to roll out their Regenerative Agriculture Framework across all their banana and pineapple farms by 2030. By leading from the front with their own farms, they hope to model sustainable practice across their wider supply chain, so that 40% of their fruit is grown with this approach by 2035.
In practice, protecting the soil on their banana and pineapple farms will involve minimising mechanical disturbance, using cover crops and leaving organic matter on the ground rather than clearing it. This returns nutrients to the soil and reduces the need for chemical inputs, while slowing evaporation and saving water.
Regenerative practice is more agnostic about chemicals than organic farming, which attempts to get rid of them entirely. Fyffes will be looking at using fertilisers and pesticides far less, and using them smarter. This can be paired with more advanced technologies, such as weed control drones that inspect pineapple farms and target herbicides exactly where they are needed. This replaces routine blanket spraying of plantations, and reduces chemical use by 80%.
Smarter irrigation can reduce water use by delivering water when it is needed and where it is needed, and using simple automation such as pausing schedules when rain is expected. Every Fyffes plantation now has a weather station and real-time monitoring.
While there have been some successes already, all of this is a long term project. The targets are for all their farms to adopt the framework, but actually working to the framework will take much longer. The first priority is to set baselines, identify promising techniques and pilot them. The full roll-out will take many years.
Big corporations have often been greeted with scepticism when making these sorts of announcements, and Fyffes is certainly a company with a few skeletons in its old colonial closet. What’s different about such strategies today is that they are actually a matter of survival in a changing climate. A regenerative agriculture strategy isn’t a nice thing to have or a bit of PR gloss. It’s how you safeguard fruit production at a time of increasing heat, disrupted rainfall and erratic global markets. It’s sustainability at its most literal: if you want to still be selling bananas and pineapples in ten years’ time, you’re going to have to learn to farm in new and improved ways.
- You can read Fyffe’s regenerative agriculture framework here.
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