Olam Agri, a leading agribusiness in food, feed, and fiber, has launched its global regenerative agriculture program across the U.S. Cotton Belt to help meet the growing demand for traceable and sustainably grown cotton.

Olam Agri started its regenerative program in cotton in 2020 to provide cotton farmers with the tools, resources, and access to market opportunities to mitigate climate risks, increase soil fertility, sequester carbon, encourage biodiversity, and manage water and energy use. The new program is the culmination of this work and will offer customers cotton products with full chain of custody certification from production, harvesting, ginning, and storage, to shipment. All the farms and ginning facilities under the program are regenagri certified.

To further support farmers during this transition towards more sustainable practices, Olam Agri plans to directly reward those who implement regenerative techniques as part of the program. This incentivization strategy is expected to encourage more participation among farmers and promote sustainable farming practices on a larger scale.

Olam Agri has received regenagri certification for more than 35,000 acres of farmland and three ginning facilities producing 22,000 tons of cotton in the U.S.

Franco Costantini, CEO of Regenagri, adds, “It’s great to see Olam Agri’s serious commitment to promote regenerative agriculture, and we’re very pleased to support them in scaling up the implementation of the regenagri program globally. The program aims to secure the health of the land and those who live on it and has tripled in growth over the last year, with more than 2.4 million acres of land worldwide under the program. It will provide Olam Agri with a third-party program to assess, certify and report the environmental impact across different commodities, from cotton to food products.”

The company has also launched this program in Côte d’Ivoire and is aiming to achieve certification for its Australia and Brazil cotton farms this year. This initiative is the largest of its kind in the cotton supply chain, demonstrating Olam Agri’s global commitment to nature-, climate- and livelihood-positive goals.

As one of the world’s largest cotton merchants, Olam Agri has decades of experience building an integrated global cotton business by working directly with large-scale farmers in Australia and the Americas, and smallholder farmers in Africa. Cotton directly supports the livelihoods of 350 million people worldwide, including 100 million farmers.

Information from Olam Agri