Smart Agriculture
Our Goal
100% of our direct farmers will be skilled, connected and financially empowered by 2025.
Our business depends on high-quality agricultural crops from thriving communities and healthy ecosystems to brew our beers. We explore how agriculture can help reduce GHG emissions, protect watersheds and improve biodiversity. Beyond the environmental aspect, we know the impacts of climate change in agriculture are closely linked with the social and economic challenges farmers face across the globe.
For progress on our targets see here
Our Strategy
Our six priority crops (barley, hops, cassava, maize, rice and sorghum) are in scope for our 2025 Smart Agriculture Goal. We take a farmer-centric approach in supporting sustainable agriculture and leverage our direct, local connections to farmers through our agronomists and researchers on the ground. To help build resilient agricultural value chains and food systems, our initiatives address the environmental aspects of farming as well as the socio-economic elements that are so closely linked.
Supporting climate resilience and biodiversity
Globally, farming practices over the last century, along with the effects of climate change, have inadvertently weakened soil health, threatened water resources and exacerbated biodiversity loss. We are working in our agricultural value chains to address these integrated issues using a collaborative systems approach to help improve soil health and farmer productivity, protect and restore water resources and biodiversity and mitigate the impact of climate change for more resilient communities.
Our soil health framework, developed in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, helps our agronomists and researchers design and measure the impact of soil health, water and biodiversity initiatives in the field. The framework creates a common set of goals and a suite of agronomic practices and implementation strategies that our zone teams can tailor to the realities of local farmers and agroecological context.
Inclusive
In 2021, we partnered with the Sustainable Food Lab and other major food and beverage companies to launch the Trusted Advisor Partnership (TAP), an initiative that provides farmers with agronomic support to improve soil health. The program is currently operating in North Dakota, where the land is especially susceptible to soil erosion, but a key outcome will be a plug-and-play model for technical assistance that can be applied to other agricultural geographies and contexts, including tribal communities.
Natural
On AB InBev’s model farm in the Western Cape, South Africa, a shift to minimum till farming has improved soil structure. In addition to mitigating the impacts of drought in a region where rainfall is erratic, minimum tillage has resulted in increased yields, reduced erosion and increased soil carbon storage. Our model farm demonstrates the viability of these regenerative practices, and in turn we can use this knowledge to guide changes among farmers in the region and the larger industry.
Local
We operate in nearly 50 countries and partner with more than 24,000 farmers in our agricultural value chain to address these integrated issues through localized solutions. A key lever to these solutions is right under your feet: soil. Supporting farmers to improve their soil health is a critical pillar of building long-term supply chain resilience, and we recognize there is no one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why we develop systems-based solutions and technologies that intentionally center on local communities and can be maintained for generations to come. We partnered with TNC to develop a framework for soil health —an approach that is flexible across the spectrum of farm sizes, crops and regions from which we source. This framework helps guide our local initiatives in the field.
Agriculture Stories
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