In the green revolution that began in the 1960s, farmers were encouraged to use new high-yielding seeds, nurture them with chemical fertilizers, and protect them from powerful herbicides and pesticides. Agricultural output increased by as much as 100%, and that rescued hundreds of millions of people from starvation.
Now, a new generation of farmers are being told they must change again — potentially risking their livelihoods — because the products and techniques they currently employ are causing irreparable damage to nature, decreasing biodiversity, and accelerating climate change.
“If we go to a farmer and say I’d like you to change the crops you plant and the products you use, they are going to be concerned about the risk,” said Tzutzuy Ramirez, head of climate and nature for Syngenta. “They have one chance a year to generate income for their families.”
In the middle of this change are giant agricultural technology companies like Syngenta, Corteva Agriscience, BASF, and Bayer. Much like the auto industry’s forced transition to electric vehicles, AgTech companies are being pushed to abandon their highly profitable seeds, fertilizers, and crop protection agents for a new wave of nature-friendly products it’s not clear their customers want.
Switzerland-based Syngenta, now part of Sinochem, a Chinese government-owned industrial conglomerate, is trying to position itself as a leader in a collection of sustainable practices known as regenerative agriculture. Doing that, Ramirez explains, will require developing new products, convincing farmers to use them, and changing — to some degree, at least — the underlying economics of a highly regulated global food market.
The Plan
Preserving uncultivated land
Ramirez joined Syngenta in January 2023 and helped develop a revised set of sustainability priorities, announced in April 2024, that is meant to guide its transition to this new model of agriculture.
A central theme in the new plan is increasing farmland yields and reclaiming unproductive land degraded from over-farming.
“When we help growers increase the productivity of their arable land, we avoid expansion of farming into natural ecosystems, which has been a major cause of biodiversity loss,” Ramirez said.
Shifting to lower-impact products
At the same time, Syngenta committed to evolving its product offerings away from traditional chemical agents, which can be very toxic and have additional detrimental effects on the environment.
“The pesticide industry has evolved massively in recent years,” Ramirez said. “Fifty years ago, we would use a kilogram of our product per hectare. Now we use grams per hectare and are moving to micrograms. With very targeted pesticides, you can foster productivity without affecting the surrounding area.”
But the transition is hardly complete. ShareAction, the U.K.-based responsible investment group, wrote in 2023 that “Syngenta poses significant risks to biodiversity” because it sells a large quantity of “highly hazardous pesticides” that are banned in the European Union and other parts of the world. The World Benchmarking Alliance rated Syngenta 19.5 out of 100 for “Ecosystem and Biodiversity” (significantly lower than Bayer and BASF).
The company says that the external rating formulas don’t fully account for all of its efforts to promote healthy ecosystems, and it defends its pesticide exports, emphasizing that farmers in different regions have different needs and environmental challenges. It also says it’s making significant investments in new approaches, including biological agents made from plants rather than petrochemicals.
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The Experiments
At least as important as developing new products is teaching farmers how to use them, along with other techniques of regenerative agriculture. No-till farming, for example, helps soil retain water and organic matter. Crop rotation and cover crops, meanwhile, rebuild soil nutrients and can reduce weeds and pests.
“We want growers to start thinking holistically, to move beyond the silo of monoculture,” Ramirez said. “Crop rotation is fundamental to bringing back biodiversity, but farmers need to understand it is also important for prosperity. If you grow the same crop every year, sooner or later the soil is not going to work anymore.”
Toward this goal, Syngenta has developed several pilot programs in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy that are meant to encourage farmers to adopt regenerative practices.
Reclaiming pastures in Brazil
The first pilot — a collaboration with Itaú BBA, a large Brazilian bank, was an effort to fight deforestation in Brazil. Farmers who agreed not to cut down any more trees for a specified period received technical assistance and low-cost loans with which they could revitalize land that had become barren. Syngenta provided soybean and corn seeds suited to the dry environment, and guidance on how to use them over time to restore the health of the soil.
Since the program, called Reverte, was launched in 2019, more than 200,000 hectares have joined the program, mainly in the Cerrado, a tropical savanna in the eastern part of the country.
“We’ve been able to slow down the rate of growth into some of those areas that could be legally deforested,” said Michael Doane, global managing director of food and freshwater systems at the Nature Conservancy.
Though that group helped provide low-cost financing, a key to the program’s success was the relationship Syngenta and Itau had forged with local farmers. “They are trusted advisors who will sit down with the farmers a couple of times a year to understand their operation,” Doane said. “They can explain why this program will help them make more money and take less risk.”
Reducing water use in China and the U.S.
Another program, Run Tian, in North China Plain, is meant to teach farmers the basic techniques of soil preservation. It’s based in Syngenta’s network of hundreds of modern agriculture platform (MAP) centers — demonstration farms that provide education, products, and digital tools that help farmers increase yields and sell their produce at premium prices.
Here too, early returns are positive. “The farmers are starting to skip some of the irrigation applications they normally would provide,” said Doane, “and that is a huge benefit to China, which has seen a depletion of their aquifers.”
More recently, the Nature Conservancy and Syngenta have started working on several programs in the United States. One aims to improve the feed management of dairy cows. Another encourages High Plains farmers to replace corn with sorghum, using a seed variety that can survive with less water and improve soil health.
The Challenges
Measurement
Tracking the impact of all these efforts is difficult, Ramirez said. There are many different factors and no agreed-upon standards to track how changes in products and practices affect carbon emissions, water use, soil quality, and biodiversity.
“Species loss is one of the most challenging,” she said. “Manually counting the number of organisms in an area is time-consuming and not scalable.” Syngenta is looking to automate the process, testing one device to track bee species and another to measure organisms in the soil.
The economics of farming
Regenerative agriculture presents a panoply of risks for farmers. Often, yields will fall in the first years of a program, as crop rotations slowly rebuild soil fertility. Sometimes, the new high-tech seeds and other agents cost more than products farmers had been using. And there is the ever-present risk that drought, flood, insect invasion, or other plagues destroy a season’s crops.
In some cases, Syngenta can mitigate some risk by building a form of insurance into its offerings. In the United States, for example, farmers that purchase its premium products, such as seeds and fungicides, can claim compensation if yields fall as a result of adverse weather conditions. In other cases, as in the Brazil program, Syngenta works with outside partners to provide financing to farmers.
The Future
Syngenta confirmed that results from its early trials are promising, and it hopes to expand the use of the techniques being developed: The company plans to open more than 1,000 MAP centers across China, for example. Still, the challenge of converting the world’s 600 million farms to regenerative agriculture is immense. And the cost of the next generation of lower-impact agricultural technology will not be entirely paid for by increases in productivity.
“We can do our part and give farmers the innovative products they need,” Ramirez added. “What’s missing in the transition to sustainable agriculture that preserves biodiversity are the financial mechanisms that shield farmers from bearing all the costs.”
Some money may come from socially minded investors through vehicles similar to the green bonds that finance projects meant to lower greenhouse gas emissions. So far, though, the market for nature-oriented investments is nascent.
Ultimately, Ramirez said, governments will need to rethink policies that in most countries regulate and subsidize agriculture to keep food prices low. In Europe, she said, signs of stress are emerging as farmers confront the costs of regulations that encourage practices that protect nature and slow climate change. “A lot of farmers are saying I’m not going to farm anymore because it is more profitable to put up solar panels than to grow crops.”
