Boortmalt is stepping up its sustainable farming action plan.

By 2030, the company will reduce the emissions of its allocated barley supply across the globe by 30%, bringing it into line with the SBTi FLAG 1.5°C target.

Boortmalt started by reducing its scope one and two emissions, which requires time, investment and innovation. This partnership with Soil Capital specifically targets scope three emissions.

The majority of Boortmalt’s emissions come from its supply chain and specifically scope three forest, land and agriculture emissions, related to the production of raw material, with the producers and co-operatives supplying the barley used in its malting process.

Support changes

Boortmalt has made a commitment to support changes in farming practices and to enable carbon sequestration.

This implies a range of agronomic adaptation strategies at farm level to maximise ground cover, replace synthetic inputs with organic ones, minimise soil disturbance and diversify crop rotations, for example.

“At Boortmalt, we believe that evolving together towards regenerative agriculture is a strong lever to cultivate sustainable produce such as malting barley.

"But the task is huge, complex and involves various degrees of adaptations for our suppliers.

"With that idea in mind, we have entered into this partnership with Soil Capital to support that pace of adaptation and make a difference,” said Boortmalt CEO Yvan Schaepman.

Boortmalt's partnership with Soil Capital is to help Boortmalt's suppliers with everything from strategic advice to boots-on-the-ground support for regenerative agriculture implementation.

The new partnership has the following objectives for 2030:

  • Reduce Boortmalt's absolute scope three forest, land and agriculture (GHG) emissions by 30%, with two-thirds of its barley supply (SBTi 1.5°C target).
  • In absolute terms, reduce the footprint of barley sourced by Boortmalt by 200,000t of CO2-equivalent.
  • Source a growing proportion of Boortmalt's barley from regenerative farming.
  • Strengthen the resilience of the barley supply chain to meet the challenges of climate change.
  • “We are impressed by Boortmalt's thoughtful and decisive strategy to reduce scope three emissions by working hand-in-hand with their suppliers," said Soil Capital CEO Chuck de Liedekerke.

    "At Soil Capital, we believe this is the right way to achieve the necessary transition at scale: by rewarding farmers' work and improving supply chain resilience, we will ultimately drastically improve carbon emissions from scope three."

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