AgroTerra speaks about the importance of ESG for crop production companies at the conference Crop Production Russia 2021
13.12.2021 13:17:00
Irina Bychkova, Chief Financial Officer at AgroTerra, participated in the conference Crop Production Russia 2021 organized by Agrotrend.ru. The experts, producers and other players in the market shared their expertise and discussed various cases. Irina spoke about ESG and its importance for crop producers since AgroTerra has been implementing ESG strategy over the course of the years.
AgroTerra started to conduct a series of field trials aimed at the sequestration of greenhouse gases in its own Technology development center. The company performs field trials together with the partners in the interests of ecological sustainability. Being guided by the recommendations prepared for AgroTerra by the consultants from Europe, the company conducts field trials in 5 regions with a total area of experiments amounting to 780 ha.
“We test different recommendations starting from no-tillage and ending with the introduction of new crops to the crop rotation. We will see first results next year and analyses it both from financial and ecological perspectives.”, said Irina Bychkova at the conference.
She also pointed out that ecological sustainability was closely related to digitalization. Implementation of digital instruments allows high traceability of the production of the products. This ensures that the processors, FMCG companies and consumers know where the product is produced, and which technology is applied.
“Precision farming is based on the data, which means we need to collect the information, communicate it through the systems and process it in a different way.”
Social sustainability remains one of the challenges of ESG transformation in the agriculture sector. The decrease of the population in the rural areas amounts to one million people over the last five years approximately. This trend is followed by a significant shift in the structure of the population when the mean age of the population increases.
“We need to do as much as we can to make young people interested in working in agriculture. We need to provide them with new production tools and good working conditions.”
According to Irina Bychkova, social sustainability represents a complex task that the Government should handle.
As to economic sustainability, AgroTerra is improving it by means of digitalization as well.
“Although the economic sustainability is not even mentioned in the ESG, other directions will not simply work without it. Agriculture represents the long-term production cycle. We need to calculate our crop rotation for 5 or 10 years ahead. Hence advanced analytics is required to ensure the economic sustainability of the company. With this aim, AgroTerra has been using the technology optimization model over the last years. It shows that agribusiness has the potential for growth of efficiency. We estimate it in the range of 20-25%.”
According to the Chief Financial Officer of Agroterra ESG is not just a popular trend but a need for the fundamental transformation of the industry. Nevertheless, the largest companies, being able to involve all the participants of the supply chain, should also show their initiative to transform the industry and the Government should be at the forefront of the coming fundamental changes.