PepsiCo supports 3 novel farming projects

Lana Shaw's 20-year career in agriculture began with a simple question: “Why not?” A fourth-generation farmer from Saskatchewan, Canada, her work is challenging conventional wisdom. So, when PepsiCo and AgMission announced a competitive funding program, Lana saw an opportunity for her research to break through.

“To see a company with that much influence be interested in these ideas feels quite momentous,” says Lana, Research Manager at South East Research Farm. PepsiCo and AgMission awarded $6.7 million in grants to support several projects, including Lana's, that are working with local farmers to develop and expand regenerative agriculture practices that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide environmental benefits.

“Agriculture is essential to PepsiCo’s business,” says Ceejay Girard, Sr. Manager, Sustainable Agriculture. That’s why the company has pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) ambitions to spread regenerative practices across 7 million acres by 2030. “We want the crops and ingredients needed to make our foods to be grown in ways that help create the best outcome for the farmer, their land, their community and the climate.”

Learn more about the novel research projects PepsiCo and AgMission, a global initiative created by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research and World Farmers’ Organisation to unlock agriculture's potential reduce greenhouse gas emissions, are funding:

Big data for local farms

To farmers, sustainability improvements often seem more theoretical than practical. The Cool Soil Initiative in Australia aims to change that by showing farmers exactly what their greenhouse gas emissions are, what they could be, and what steps they can take to reach that target. “We didn’t just want to observe from afar,” says Dr. Cassandra Schefe, a soil scientist and project lead. “We wanted to roll up our sleeves, listen to why farmers do what they do, and work together to see how we can do better.”

The data-driven project arms researchers with five years’ worth of findings sourced from wheat, canola and maize farms in Eastern Australia and will expand into oats in Western Australia, with aims to engage with more than 300 farmers over the next three years. The goal is to identify and implement climate-smart farming practices that can improve resilience and reduce emissions. “We were already starting to make an impact locally,” Dr. Schefe says. “Helping more farmers and gathering more data could accelerate the impact we can have nationally.”

Less soil disruption, more water

A drier climate is degrading the quality of soil in the Bajío region of Mexico, known as the country's breadbasket. The decrease in rainfall is so challenging that some maize and wheat farmers have even had to migrate to find more fertile land.

“There needs to be a different solution,” says Tek Sapkota, Senior Scientist for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. “We're working directly with local farmers to identify their biggest climate-induced stressors and strategies to address them.”

Conservation agriculture, which involves minimal soil disruption, planting new crops over the residue of harvested ones, and appropriate crop rotation, is one solution. It preserves moisture and nutrients in the soil and reduces carbon emissions. “We're not reinventing the wheel. These are proven practices,” Tek says. “We're trying to see what benefits they can bring to farmers here.”

Switching cover crop seasons

Lana Shaw and her team are also breaking new ground by applying a proven technique in different ways — cover cropping. While it is an established method in many places, farmers in Western Canada dismissed it because it is ill-suited to the region’s poor growing conditions in the fall.

Lana’s team is working with canola and oat farmers to experiment with spring cover crops — planting two crops simultaneously, right on top of one another. One is for harvest. The second planting stays short and remains on the fields after the canola or oats are harvested, Lana says. Their purpose is to replenish nutrients in the soil and prevent erosion.

“We’re working to find a path to demonstrate that it can fit here,” Lana says. “It’s just going to look very different.” If successful, spring planting can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating an additional trip through the fields with large machinery, all while boosting soil health, crop quality and yield.

While the goals of each grantee are different, “the AgMission partnership allows us to find ways to expand new practices at scale,” Ceejay says. “This way, we can get closer to our collective goals by accelerating the world's understanding of regenerative agriculture.”