Nutrien & The Carbon Economy

Today we have announced our partnership with Nutrien Ltd. in a pursuit to set the standard for sustainability and carbon management within agriculture. While we take these steps with Nutrien as our partner in the carbon economy, we wouldn’t be capable of taking on these ambitious goals without our employees who play an integral part in building our culture everyday and several of our external stakeholders including; Verge, helping us reduce total miles and idle time on equipment, G-Macs AgTeam, providing us with crop inputs and agronomy expertise and FieldSmart precision agronomy, data and technology support, ensuring we choose the optimal equipment.

Our comments from the press release;

“Coutts Agro is delighted to partner with Nutrien on their sustainability strategy and carbon objectives. We are focused on aligning sustainability, agronomy and profitability to move our company and industry forward. By directly addressing issues related to climate change, our industry has an opportunity to improve our carbon footprint and be rewarded accordingly, building off of performance demonstrated by leading edge companies who prioritize progressive ESG standards. We look forward to working with Nutrien to properly define agricultures role in the carbon economy with private market solutions.”

Why Are We Doing This?

As stated above, we are true believers that environmental performance aligns with agronomic and economic performance, and any time we make a decision to optimize any of these variables, the other two do follow. While we have always looked at carbon output as a combined portion of many of our line items on our P&L, we are now seeing it as a direct cost itself via carbon taxes.

With this focus, we believe we will continue to improve our carbon footprint, and over the long-term, and be appropriately compensated for that improved performance. Incentives matter, and we believe Nutrien’s vision can lead the agriculture industry to a brighter place.

Some of our industry’s current agronomic practices are primitive and often unproven. With our partners, we intend to fully vet and help standardize those practices for the future, allowing them to become as commonplace as no-till is today within Canada. At the same time, we will continue to test new products and practices from our existing stakeholders, with this we welcome new partners and ideas, please feel free to reach out to us: info@couttsagro.com

Below is a visual example of how we see our environmental and economic performance improving simultaneously. Using Verge, we are able to optimize our in-field logistics, eliminating waste from path inefficiencies, which reduces the total miles and hours in equipment, saving costs and emissions.

We are excited to work with Nutrien’s team that is dedicated to improving the sustainability of our industry. We know it won’t be a linear path, as innovation never is. As we look to the other side of the creative process, we picture the industry in a more profitable state, well positioned to lean into the future and working holistically with all stakeholders in the agriculture carbon economy.