Anniversary!

Our astonishing journey started for real on 3rd May 2023 with a meeting at Soil Capital base in Perwez, Belgium.  Cefetra Group signed off our carbon and farming strategy in late 2022.

We were confident that our supply chain’s solutions role, the link between farming and its industrial customers, could be pivotal for progressing regenerative farming, especially in the UK where Cefetra Ltd has a strong farm originating business.

The collaboration with Soil Capital, which emerged from this meeting, provided the methodology and wherewithal to offer a proven, high-integrity programme to our farmers and customers, and to do it quickly.

We launched the programme in autumn 2023 at our Ormiston grain store and have not looked back since.

We just concluded signing up farmers for the third harvest employing the programme and are about to commence making payments for outcomes from the second year.  We have paid UK farmers for over 50,000mt of co2e saved or removed.

Outcomes from the regenerative transitions farmers have achieved under the Cefetra/Soil Capital programme have been sold to off takers in our supply chains big and small.

They include PepsiCo, Heineken, Whitworth, Nestlé, Purina, Boortmalt, BioMar, and Grant’s, with others in beverages and, crucially, in the animal feed industry to become public soon

Cefetra Ecosystem Services has been instrumental in the development of seed, fertiliser and soil improvement solutions, developed in house and through partnerships, such as the one with Kelp Crofters which we announced recently.

HSBC, NatWest and Oxbury accept membership of the Cefetra Ecosystems programme as proof of regenerative practices that qualify them for preferential financing terms. This is a recognition of their increased resilience and performance.

Benefits to farmers are clear, better soils, improved economics/welfare and long-term farm viability. Likewise grain and oilseed buyers engaging with the programme have realized that this is not a case of defined cost vs uncertain reward.

For example, buyers of our grains and oilseeds can access preferential financing based on improving their business by investing in lower emissions, better soils, reduced impact on water and an improvement in biodiversity.

There is more to come, and we are excited about the road ahead.

We are only at the beginning of convincing the consumer that it would not be expensive to demand from food and beverage industries and retailers that they support regenerative farming.

Real outcomes are not expensive.

The cost of halving emissions from barley in beer is less than 100th of a penny per bottle of beer and halving the impact from growing grains for bread or feeding poultry means much less than 1% in the cost of bread or eggs to the consumer