We help our customers grow a better tomorrow
We’re the dependable partner behind thousands of agricultural success stories. We find better ways to fight weeds and disease, increase crop yields and turn scientific breakthroughs into local solutions. It all comes from who we are, our history, our experience working with farmers and growers, all wrapped up in the values we’re built on. Here is our story:
Our purpose and ambition
We are a global crop protection and seed technology company that has been helping growers fight disease, weeds and pests for more than 100 years. We do this by developing and manufacturing crop protection solutions and Beyond Yield™ seed technologies.
Our purpose is to help our customers grow a better tomorrow. Our ambition is to grow our relevance by delivering more sustainable solutions over more acres every year.
Our strategy
Our crop protection strategy focuses on five core crops in three key regions.
We develop, manufacture and sell crop protection solutions including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides that help growers protect crops against weeds, pests and disease. We operate primarily in the off-patent market, providing customers with long-standing foundational products and unique formulations. Our business is focused on five core crops across key geographies (Europe, Middle East & Africa; North America; and Asia Pacific). The crops we focus on are cereals; corn; soybean; pasture, turf and ornamentals (T&O); and trees, nuts, vines and vegetables (TNVV).
Seed Technologies combines our seed treatment portfolio and the Nuseed business. Our seed treatment products provide protection and treatment for damage caused by insects, fungus and disease. Nuseed develops unique plant output traits with specific customer and consumer benefits. We call this our Value BEYOND YIELD™ strategy. Nuseed distributes high yielding sunflower, sorghum and canola seed to customers in more than 30 countries.
Advancing our sustainability ambition
In 2021, to demonstrate our commitment to sustainable agricultural and production processes, we adopted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We matched our ambition to advance the SDGs to our strengths and scale; selecting the goals we believe we can influence and are most relevant to our stakeholders. Central to our mission to “grow a better tomorrow’ is enabling efficient agricultural food production while protecting the natural environment and human health, across our products’ life cycle.
We contribute to SDG 2: Zero Hunger and SDG 15: Life on the Land, with crop protection products that help growers get more from less; growing more food to feed an increasing population, while limiting land clearing for agricultural use.
Our carbon sequestering source of aviation biofuel, Nuseed Carinata goes to the heart of finding solutions to address climate change and contribute to SDG 13: Climate Action.
Contributing to the aspirations of SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production we set additional environmental targets in 2021, to reduce our hazardous waste by 20%, our volatile organic air emissions by 25% and certify all manufacturing sites to ISO14001, all to be achieved by 2025.
We continue to expand our products Aquaterra and Nutriterra, the world’s first plant-based source of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Both products were certified as Friend of the Sea in 2021, recognising their contribution to SDG 14: Life Below Water by taking the pressure off our valuable marine resources.
We passionately believe our people and products can help deliver solutions to some of the sustainability challenges the world faces. We will continue to seek more ways we can advance the SDG’s as we embed them into our strategies and approach to doing business.
Materiality
Our material sustainability issues are those that are most impactful on our business strategies and influence the decisions of our key stakeholders. Our goal is to be completely transparent in reporting our management approach and performance of our material sustainability issues.
We seek to continually improve our materiality study each year through expanding its breadth and depth, gaining a better understanding of the sustainability priorities and transparency needs of our important stakeholders, while keeping abreast of the changing sustainability landscape. Last year we extended our materiality study to some of our key external stakeholders for the first time; directly engaging with our customers and financiers to add their perspective to that of our people and senior leadership team.
Our materiality study has shown us that our key stakeholders are strongly aligned with our senior leadership on the importance of sustainability topics such as product regulatory compliance and worker occupational health and safety.
This year we sought the input of some of our investors and learnt that they agree on the importance of worker health and safety and robust process safety management systems, along with strong governance processes. They also identified managing environmental risk and compliance and upholding international human rights standards, as material issues to them.
Through engaging our stakeholders on sustainability matters, we also learnt that they want greater transparency on other sustainability topics that are material to them, such as how we look after grower health and safety and how we are adapting our products to respond to the sustainability challenges faced by the agricultural industry. We appreciate this insight and have worked to respond in this report and also in our GRI Content and Index..
Our RARE values
Our actions are anchored by our RARE values. Our employees are encouraged to unearth the possibilities everyday. We aim to provide an inclusive environment where individuals are valued for their diversity and empowered to reach their full potential. This is a reference to our high performing culture and also reflects the three principles of our employee value proposition – own your growth, stay curious and come as you are.
Responding to Covid-19 challenges
Responding to Covid-19 challenges It has been more than a year since the Covid-19 global pandemic began and we are proud to be an essential service, operating through the pandemic to provide valuable inputs to the agricultural industry.
Being a global organisation has introduced its own unique challenges as Covid-19 status and restrictions continually change country to country. Each region has its own Covid-19 Response Team who regularly assesses the local situation and adapts our Covid-19 safe work practices to keep our people safe at all times.
With working from home being the new normal for many of our people, we deployed remote working policies to provide more flexible work arrangements and as protracted lockdowns continue in some regions, we have provided mental health support to our lockdown fatigued people.
Our customers are at the centre of everything we do; taking care of our customers and growers is just as important to us as taking care of each other. Labour shortages due to border restriction and delays in getting equipment and inputs are just two of the ways that Covid-19 has put more uncertainty and stress on the farming community.
In the face of global logistics and freight challenges our people have demonstrated their commitment to our customers. Everything that could be done has been done to ensure we continued to supply our customers with the critical products they need to keep agriculture going.
