A Lighter Touch programme partner Corteva NZ says its recent Sustainability Workshop was a perfect opportunity to shine a light on leading farmers and growers doing the right thing for the environment.
The workshop, held in Melbourne in May, followed on from the 2022 Corteva Agriscience Climate Positive Leaders programme, a nomination-based recognition programme designed to showcase early adopter producers who are successfully implementing, scaling and sharing climate positive practices.
The programme attracted eight outstanding nominations from throughout New Zealand, representing a range of production systems, across arable, dairy and viticulture. The New Zealand and Australian nominees, their nominators, and other industry organisations such as A Lighter Touch and the Foundation for Arable Research were hosted by Corteva at the Sustainability Workshop.
Corteva NZ General Manager, Richard Brenton-Rule, said Corteva has a strong global focus on delivering sustainability-enhanced crop protection, plant health and seed innovations to enable climate positive production.
“So, we felt it is important to build a strong connection with producers and other influencers leading the way in this area to develop a clearer understanding of how we can support them with innovation, and beyond. We look forward to continuing the conversation as our pipeline ramps up in the next three to five years”.
Some key observations and take-homes from the workshop include:
- There is genuine desire for collaboration amongst all stakeholders leading the way forward in science-based sustainable agriculture. Transparency and courage were raised as highly valued traits here.
- There is an important opportunity for our farmers and their stakeholders, including Corteva, to align and educate consumers. We are, however, having to make hefty assumptions on future needs of consumer markets and how we collectively respond within farm production systems.
- Supporting food retailers locally and globally to tell the crop protection and plant health story to consumers is going to be important.
- ‘Sustainability’ is a generic term – we all need to use it wisely, perhaps with more definition.
Corteva NZ are proud to announce Andrew Darling of Timaru as Climate Positive Regional Leader. Andrew was nominated by Mark Collie of H&T Agronomics.
