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Monsanto announces program to address climate change

A leading agricultural company says it is taking steps to fight climate change.

Monsanto has announced a program to make its operations carbon neutral by 2021.  Monsanto’s Mike Lohuis says the program targets the company’s seed and crop protection operations and provides farmers with resources promoting best management practices like reduced tillage or no-till.

“A second part is the use of crops like cover crops,” Lohuis said. “Cover crops enable the land to keep working for you, to keep extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and putting it into the soil and the combination of those two is very large component of the solution.”

And Lohuis tells Brownfield they’re working on a program to provide incentives to farmers who adopt carbon neutral crop production practices.

“We think that in doing so we will enable farmers to enhance what they are already doing and for some farmers who haven’t given some of these practices a chance yet they will have the opportunity to try it and receive some incentive for doing so,” said Lohuis.

Monsanto says farmer incentives will be given for neutral crop production methods “in exchange for part of their carbon reduction value” – and that those offsets will “neutralize” Monsanto’s remaining carbon footprint.

For more information about Monsanto’s climate change efforts go here.

Audio: Mike Lohuis, Agriculture Environmental Strategies Lead, Monsanto