10 tips to go green in the grains, pulses and oilseeds sector

Going green is very important in the grains, pulses and oilseeds sector. If you become more environmentally friendly now, you will be ready for the extra green requirements that both European buyers and consumers set. Improve the quality of your soil, choose more sustainable farming methods, improve packaging and transport, get certified and use green innovations, and this will help your business strategy. When you include sustainability in your business, it benefits the planet and it also gives you a better reputation and a competitive advantage in a market that is changing fast.

1. Recognise the importance of responsible production

Just like every industry, the grains, pulses and oilseeds sector impacts the environment. As a producer of these products, you can help the environment by using sustainable methods.

If you are more sustainable, you will reduce your impact and protect natural resources for future generations.

As the global population grows, there is more demand for food. The current food system is not sustainable, and people are worried about how it will meet demand in the future. We can make the grains, pulses and oilseeds sector more sustainable, to help to guarantee food security by protecting natural resources and supporting sustainable farming practices.

The planet and the people need it

‘Going green’ often goes together with ‘going social’. When you use sustainable farming practices, this is good for nature and also good for the farmers. Going green can also lead to higher yields, healthier crops and a healthier living environment for the people who live on and near the farm.

Round table on Responsible Soy

One example of when going green goes together with going social is the Round Table on Responsible Soy. This is an initiative for a global conversation about soy that is financially, socially and environmentally strong. The first members included the food retail chain Coop and the international company Unilever that owns many other companies.

Health and nutrition

Many products in this sector are an important part of what people eat. However, many common farming practices, like using pesticides and fertilisers, can be bad for people’s health. When the sector is more sustainable, this can help to make sure that these foods are grown in ways that are safe and nutritious.

Buyers and consumers increasingly require it 

Supermarket chains are adding more organic products and they require importers and exporters to have certifications that show that they work in a sustainable way. Companies that can prove that they are sustainable can do business with supermarket chains in Northern Europe, and these companies have more long-term business relationships in the European market

It is not enough to be competitive; sustainability is now a basic feature of every successful grains, pulses or oilseeds business.

Consumer awareness

All over the world, consumers are thinking more about environmental issues. In Europe, consumers think a lot about climate change and what they can do to reduce its effects. More and more consumers choose products that have organic certification and that are produced locally. This means that, as a non-European supplier, you need to be just as sustainable as European farmers. For example, the Swedish cooperative Lantmännen had the ambition to grow its products sustainably, so they started a Climate & Nature programme for sustainable grain cultivation and introduced a wheat flour that has a smaller impact on the climate and the environment.

Governments are working on legislation

Governments in Europe are always working on rules and laws for the food industry. These rules and laws often focus on sustainability. 

2. Analyse your supply chain to find the key issues

You may not be able to influence every aspect of the supply chain, but you can control your impact in important areas like inputs, primary production and primary processing. Some parts of the supply chain can do more than 1 task. For example, an importer/wholesaler can also be the processor/packer.

Figure 1: Sustainability impacts along the grains, pulses and oilseeds supply chain (not exhaustive)

Source: Globally Cool, 2023

The aspects of this sector that cause pollution are fertilisers, processing, packaging and transport. Other things may not pollute the environment directly but they cause environmental problems, for example the wrong kind of water management and deforestation. We will talk about that in Tip 3.

Fertilisers

Fertilisers cause the most pollution in the grains, pulses and oilseeds sector. Going green means choosing organic fertilisers like compost, liquid plant manures, humic acid, grain meal, amino acids and seaweed extracts.

Processing, packaging and transport

Processing, packaging and transport also cause a lot of pollution. You can become greener by reducing your environmental impact when you process, package and transport your products

For example, quinoa has new packaging options available that can hold between 1 and 2 tons of quinoa, instead of the original bags that can hold 40­–60 kg. This means that we can use less packaging material per kilogram of quinoa

Another way to reduce the environmental impact of your product is to improve the packaging in a way that reduces food waste. For quinoa, you can use ‘impermeable’ flexible packaging that reduces the amount of oxygen that gets to the product, and you can use transport methods that have less oxygen.

3. Use sustainable farming practices

Sustainable farming is about using resources, including land, fertile soil and animals, in a way that lets them be renewed without damaging or polluting other resources. 2 important sustainable farming methods are organic farming and regenerative agriculture.

You can use regenerative agricultural practices like inter-cropping (growing 2 or more crops in the same field), reducing or stopping tillage, crop rotation and precision agriculture (reducing chemical and biological inputs). This improves the health of the soil so you can grow good-quality food, and it helps to reduce climate change and restore biodiversity.

Organic agricultural practices can reduce the environmental impact of farming. These methods include using natural pesticides, crop rotation and composting. You can also use renewable energy sources, for example solar or wind, for your irrigation and farm equipment. This can help to reduce the carbon footprint of farming operations.

Shares Uganda Ltd develops, finances, processes and exports organic and regular agricultural products in Uganda. They work directly with small-scale farmers, and they give training so that the farmers can keep up with high standards. They follow the standards of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which do not allow chemical pesticides or child labour.

Optimise your soil quality

‘Soil optimisation’ (making sure that your soil is the best possible quality) is important in farming because we need healthy soil to grow healthy plants. When soil is optimised, it has a lot of organic matter, it has a healthy balance of nutrients and it loses less water. Experts say that ‘soil depletion’ (when soil becomes less fertile) is the biggest problem in the grains, pulses and oilseeds sector, and it is related to sustainability.

The soil is being depleted in the countries where the grains, pulses and oilseeds are grown. This happens more often in regular, large-scale, single-crop agriculture like soybean cultivation.

Soil optimisation in organic farming usually involves methods like crop rotation, cover cropping, organic fertilisers and products that help the soil. For example, sorghum can be a perfect cover crop to keep water in the soil. Rotating your crop with pulses can keep nitrogen in the soil. These practices help to keep the soil healthy, improve the soil structure and grow more helpful microorganisms in the soil.

When they optimise their soil, farmers can produce high-quality crops that are healthy and nutritious, and also protect the long-term health of the soil and the environment. This is different from conventional farming, which often uses a lot of chemical fertilisers and pesticides that can make the soil quality worse in the end.

You can use methods for regenerative agriculture to optimise your soil quality. Regenerative agriculture is a food production system that focuses on results. It protects and restores healthy soil, it protects the climate, water and biodiversity and it makes farms more productive and profitable.

To use regenerative agriculture, you need to look at all aspects of farming. You can look carefully at things like how well nutrients work together in crop rotation between different crops or the best type of soil cover for the type of cash crop you want to grow.

Reduce water use

Agriculture uses a lot of water, and inefficient use of water can be a problem if you do not have a lot of water available. Good water management can help to increase crop yields and profitability at the same time as it protects natural resources. There are many options. 1 good practice is drip irrigation, which sends water directly to the roots of plants. You can also collect rainwater. If you have more water than you need, you can divert some of it from fields, and you can also use natural stream beds to control water flow.

There is a lot of information online about water management for this sector. For example, you can read this study about the drip irrigation effect on sunflower oil production in sandy soil or this example of drip irrigation for rice growers. However, drip irrigation is not very common for most products in this sector. If you are an arable farmer, Agrismart has made a list of water management tools for arable farmers.

Solar irrigation can also be a solution for areas where there is not a lot of water. In the Indonesian village of Krincing, rice farmers have installed solar panels to power a water pump that irrigates rice fields.

If you have problems with water and climate in your area, you can try different crop varieties. Instead of producing common wheat, you can choose ancient grains such as einkorn, spelt or emmer that can survive drought. Native African grains like teff, fonio and sorghum are also good options in dry, warm climates.

You can also use seed varieties that need less water. Timothy is a sunflower farmer from Tanzania. He grew the same kind of sunflowers in his fields for more than 10 years, but then the weather in his area became dryer. This made it difficult to keep his crops healthy, and his harvest was reduced by more than half. Timothy joined a project by Farm Africa called Flourishing Futures. They introduced him to an improved variety of a seed called Hysun 33, which can grow well in dry conditions. Timothy now harvests nearly 5 times as many seeds from 1 acre of Hysun 33 flowers than he harvested from 5 acres of the traditional variety.

Avoid deforestation

Some products in this sector cause serious deforestation. Deforestation is a big cause of biodiversity loss, soil erosion, less storage of carbon and also climate change. Growers should try not to clear forest land to turn it into farmland. There are initiatives that do 100% sustainable trade with no long-term deforestation. One example is IDH’s Sustainable Trade Initiative, which has a project for crops like soy.

Another way to improve biodiversity that was lost because of deforestation is by protecting or planting ‘forest curtains’. These forest curtains protect the agricultural fields in between them, and they also help to protect diversity and soil quality. Semear Group from Bolivia is a chia seed company. They have a video that shows these forest curtains.

If you are thinking about introducing sustainable farming practices, it is a good idea to get help from an agricultural advisor who has experience in changing from traditional to sustainable farming. You can use their experience to help you introduce the new methods faster. This will reduce the training time for the people who work at the farm, and it will also build trust in the process. You can find advisors online, but you can also contact them through business support organisations (BSOs) or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that work in your country. 

4. Improve your transport and logistics

It is very important to reduce transport emissions so that we can reduce the environmental impact of the food industry. Efficient transport is good for the planet, but it can also be more profitable. Most grains, pulses and oilseeds are already transported in bulk, which is usually the most efficient method. However, it is always good to think about improvements.

Food system emissions around the world produce 5.8 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e), which is 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

A lot of these emissions are caused by products that come from animals, like meat and dairy, and by animal feed (like some grains that are included in this study). Of course, pulses, oilseeds and grains that are grown for other purposes also cause some of these emissions.

Table 1: Selected grains, pulses or oilseeds with relatively lower CO2 emissions per kilogram produced

Source: Carbon Cloud

Table 2: Selected grains, pulses or oilseeds with relatively higher CO2 emissions per kilogram produced

Source: Carbon Cloud

The emissions from these products happen during the agricultural phase, the processing phase and the transport phase. It is important to reduce transport emissions so that we can reduce the environmental impact of the food industry. For spices and herbs, packaging has a big effect.

You have several options if you want to make your transport and logistics more sustainable:

• use bulk packaging;
• use vacuum packaging for grains or seeds that lose their unique features when they are stored for a long time, or if there is an increased risk from pests. This type of packaging often costs more money, and your buyer may not be willing to pay for it. 1 example is the VacQPack system;
• save space in the container by transporting the bags without pallets. Use liners on the floor and walls (see pictures of dunnage) to protect the bags and to make sure there is enough ventilation. Remember that this may increase the handling costs for your buyer because they need to unload manually;
• use more fuel-efficient vehicles;
• send several shipments at the same time;
• find the best routes;
• choose varieties of grains, pulses or oilseeds that can be sent by sea, because this transport method has much lower emissions than air transport.