Syngenta and The Nature Conservancy have jointly positioned themselves as standard-bearers on topics such as soil health, climate change, and rural prosperity.
Innovation in modern agriculture is helping to bridge the gap between environmental stewardship and society’s demand for farm-sourced products, including food, fiber, and biofuels. Such advancements allow for prime farmland to sustain a growing population, projected to brush close to 10 billion people by 2050, without resorting to destroying natural habitats.
Yet in a space where it makes sense for environmental groups to be allying themselves with major agricultural stakeholders at every opportunity, often the inverse happens: There is a vilification of “Big Ag” and production-scale farmers.
What should be a fundamental alliance toward sustainability instead pits soil and crop science against eco-ideology. And headlines aren’t shy about intensifying this divide.
Greenpeace, for example, blames “Big Ag” for pushing the climate crisis from a tipping point into a freefall. The Natural Resources Defense Council accuses animal agricultural of being major water and air polluters and of “making us sick.” Earthjustice conjures war-like imagery against the food system and “chemical-dependent monocultures.”
These hardened stances make the long-standing partnership toward soil health and environmental sustainability between Syngenta, one of the largest agricultural companies in the world, and The Nature Conservancy, a global land and water preservation nonprofit, remarkable.
After working together on a local level since 2009, the two organizations entered into a global partnership to have a broader and more substantial impact on improving farmland and natural spaces. Their efforts deliver multi-tiered initiatives toward land sustainability, systemic approaches to scientific improvements, and targeted investments across varying disciplines.
“If we are not able to increase productivity, if we are not able to actually do it in a way that replenishes soil and nature through a regenerative agriculture concept, what is going to happen with the planet?,” asked Dr. Tzutzuy Ramirez-Hernandez, Head of Climate and Nature at Syngenta Group. Through functional science and innovation, farmers “can actually stay on the same arable land rather than occupying other parts of the world to grow crops to meet the demands of society.”
The organizations are striving to leverage conservation on a large scale in ways that maintain profitability and high productivity for farm owners, while ensuring that the next generation will be able to inherit land with robust soil health that’s capable of carrying a growing population forward.
In the early 2000s, The Nature Conservancy began to look at the agriculture sector in a new way, especially given the influence the industry has on provisioning land and water resources for food, energy, and other things. The nonprofit identified farmers, ranchers, and the companies supporting these producers as gateways to important conservation solutions.
The small-scale collaborations that began in 2009 between Syngenta and TNC matured in 2018, when the CEOs of both organizations saw the strategic impact they could have by working together globally.
“Syngenta is one of the largest investors in the fundamental research and development that translates into products and services that farmers and ranchers use all around the world,” said Michael Doane, TNC’s Global Managing Director, Food & Freshwater Systems. “We went from doing kind of small test projects on the ground to really thinking about the underlying investment thesis of a company like Syngenta, knowing that their business is really long cycle R&D.”
Yet discussing climate change, soil health, and regenerative practices are deeply scientific and slow-moving concepts, which have always had to compete with a practical farm mindset of just getting the work done.
“On the farm, your time is divided between two things rather equally: things that are already broken down and the things that are about to break down,” said Doane. “And so you’re kind of in a very operational mindset all the time.”
Agriculture is also well-known as a space where those lobbying for a particular position deliver competing messages and don’t always understand the dynamics of rural communities. The ways of doing business on the farm can almost seem stagnant at times, so it takes effort to factor in the chronic concerns amid the more acute, operational ones.
“It’s sometimes hard to see the patterns and see how things play out over time,” Doane said.
Yet, he noted, Syngenta offers an approach that will change the nature of the decisions of management practices for farmers and ranchers all around the world. And dating back more than a decade with the Good Growth Plan, Syngenta was one of the first agricultural companies to put sustainability into a framework that is systematically approachable across its many business units.
Today, the four sustainability commitments that Syngenta spearheads consist of higher yield crops with a lower impact, regenerating the land, improving rural prosperity, and making the supply chain more efficient. The company looks to understand how to support growers, who already are leading stewards of the land, as they transition to more modern methods — rather than imposing something new without any contextual understanding of how agriculture works.
Much of the guidance in fulfilling these commitments comes from the expertise of The Nature Conservancy. Syngenta said TNC is adept at challenging the ag company to do more and to continuously evaluate the science behind what’s being done. In this way, Syngenta has been handed better tools for how to prioritize its sustainability efforts in the midst of global productivity needs.
They “help us to think about what will come next, about what are the topics that we need to start thinking about,” Ramirez said. “Of course, we have our own perspective, based on the kind of trends that we are seeing in the market, but TNC has been very helpful in challenging us on how we interpret things.”
Syngenta has invested $1.57 billion since 2020 on sustainability innovation, accounting for 78 percent of the $2 billion it has pledged to invest in sustainable agriculture breakthroughs by 2025. Ramirez added that TNC helps to scale programs quickly and identify the financial mechanisms that make conservation most relevant for farmers and ranchers.
Soil health and regenerative agricultural applications are among the biggest concepts TNC has been preaching. That catalyst has helped make Syngenta the only major agricultural company that employs a chief soil scientist.
Doane said that TNC strongly aligns behind the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s principles on soil health, which include reducing soil disruption in the system, increasing cover crops and diversity, adding more time for living roots to be in the soil, and reintegrating livestock.
“And doing all of that within the context of the place you’re in, the farm you’re in, and the foodscape you’re in,” said Doane, who is a row-crop and cattle farmer in Central Kansas.
The Nature Conservancy is among the forefront of conservation groups in that it believes that land degradation is a threat on par with climate change and biodiversity loss. A 2023 report by McKinsey & Co. titled, Striking the balance: Catalyzing a sustainable land-use transition, showed that “business as usual” around the world means that society is on track to soon clear 70 million to 80 million hectares globally to meet the demand for food and energy and settlements. Yet TNC sees opportunity for land in places like Latin America or even in North America that’s already cleared and able to be utilized with a smaller environmental impact.
“A lot of our focus is on helping intensify production — but doing that in ways that are good for the soils, good for the ecosystems on existing cleared land,” Doane said.
In Doane’s own region of Kansas, he’s seen degradation through water scarcity and concerns for the Ogallala Aquifer, as well as in local water quality. He states that more than 80 percent of the streams and rivers are impaired because of human activities.
“There are good people in these communities, and there are good people in companies like Syngenta,” Doane said. “Our job is to be open and curious and committed to learning what kind of opportunities there are to still increase the way we produce food, but also to do it in a way that also achieves another vitally important goal, which is environmental conservation and being able to conserve resources for future generations.”
Some of this is based on communication, which hasn’t always been a strength with the environmental community, especially when trying to encourage change in the agricultural space. But Doane sees land degradation as a profound way to frame the conversation about agriculture’s future and the opportunities that farmers and ranchers have to pass their legacy to the next generation.
It’s also a facet that could better connect the varying demographics in America: the stability of rural communities and the demands from urban and suburban sectors.
Despite the value it holds, TNC does admit that the regenerative part of its structure can be difficult to quantify, particularly as its own analysis of the literature shows more than 200 definitions of “regenerative agriculture” in use — none of which are federally regulated or otherwise legally binding. However, most tend to center around the idea of rebuilding natural capital.
“For us, regenerative agriculture is an outcome-based approach,” Ramirez explained. “It’s concentrated on positive impacts regarding soil health, increasing biodiversity, water management, and all these kinds of things. It’s really moving the needle to the next step of sustainability.”
The two organizations are approaching conservation and sustainability on multiple fronts and in regions around the world. Syngenta and The Nature Conservancy each have hundreds of sustainability projects going on worldwide. They include:
- Work done toward discovering and implementing technology to help decarbonize the dairy sector, which, amid major increases in the number of cows in the western U.S., saw its national average intensity of greenhouse gas emissions decrease by 42 percent over the past five decades.
- Investments made in electronic collars that could help improve the operational efficiency of rotational grazing.
- Efforts aimed at exploring grassland ecology and how to renew natural ecosystems
Having announced a renewal of their global partnership in May 2024, a major initiative in China aims to regenerate thousands of hectares of agricultural soils in North China Plain, while an effort in Brazil called the REVERTE program hopes to make the restoration of degraded land a profitable option for farmers.
The partnership is also working in the United States on two large-scale projects.
The first involves testing regenerative practices and regenerative management in seed production. This would take place with corn seeds, soybean seeds, or any other seed that Syngenta is working with.
“We have a target of around 80 percent of our farmers supplying seeds for us who are going to be regenerative agricultural farmers,” Ramirez said.
The goal is to reduce the environmental footprint of the seed supply chain and preserve the quality of seeds delivered to Syngenta Group customers.
The second big U.S. effort is enhancing cropland’s climate resilience and reducing farming pressure on water resources by using sorghum in crop rotations.
“Sorghum has potential to become a more significant part of the crop rotation,” Doane said. “And what would it take for that to occur? There’s still a need for effective weed control and for effective pest control of all kinds. … But the value in our mind is that it’s very water efficient, and so it could play a bigger role in transitioning places where we have real water stress.”
Global agriculture appears poised to benefit from the unique partnership that continues between Syngenta and The Nature Conservancy — a partnership that exists in a way that few, if any, others do.
Syngenta has nearly 60,000 employees, while TNC boasts 5,000, with 20 percent of them being scientists. These organizations are well positioned to push agriculture to deliver on the necessary financial strategies for farmers and ranchers to be sustainable, as well as advancing the conservation solutions that are most suitable for farmland.
“We are very interested in pragmatic and business-led, policy-led solutions that have the ability to scale up,” Doane said. “We work with capable organizations that have the right intent. If we can complement the way that those organizations start to work around us, that’s a good way to fulfill our mission.”
Ryan Tipps is the founder and managing editor of AGDAILY. He has covered farming since 2011, and his writing has been honored by state- and national-level agricultural organizations.
