General Mills & Syngenta Southern Minnesota Sugar Beet Project

General Mills has made a commitment to responsibly sourcing their key agricultural ingredients by 2020. General Mills and Syngetna are partnering together on a Minnesota project that will enable General Mills to credibly meet its goal and bring value to sugar beet producers. This program will create a platform that enables participating growers and value chain members to gain and share valuable insights about the impacts and benefits of their management decisions across several key resource issues and the bottom line. This project will engage producers around Renville, MN to establish a baseline and document improvements across the spring sugar beet rotation.

Complete
Insight

Engagement Targets

Notes: (1) I Minor fluctuations in the number of retained growers is expected from year to year. These fluctuations may be due to year-over-year crop rotation effects or other factors beyond the control of the project. Enrolled acres represent the total number of acres on an individual farm in a specific year. The ability to report enrolled acres is based on the Fieldprint Project Standard requirement that individual growers enrolled in projects enter at least 10% of the acres managed for a specific crop. (2) Entered acres represent the actual number of enrolled acres for which data is entered in the Fieldprint Platform for analysis.

Objectives

Establish a 5-year grower baseline with project participants to demonstrate future opportunities for improvement.
Second Party Verified

We worked with Syngenta to capture field level data from 8 producers to better understand sustainability outcomes.  We met annually to review aggregated reporting, share individual grower reports, hear from expert speakers, engage in small group discussions, etc.  We have demonstrated continuous improvement in some indicators but not others, and have added practice based surveys where needed.  We have provided thank you gifts for growers and are now engaging with them and supplier partners to chart out plans for 2021 crop and beyond. 

Collaborate with growers over time to implement sustainability measures at a field level and characterize the rotation.
Second Party Verified

We worked with Syngenta to capture field level data from 8 producers to better understand sustainability outcomes.  We met annually to review aggregated reporting, share individual grower reports, hear from expert speakers, engage in small group discussions, etc.  We have demonstrated continuous improvement in some indicators but not others, and have added practice based surveys where needed.  We have provided thank you gifts for growers and are now engaging with them and supplier partners to chart out plans for 2021 crop and beyond. 

Show continuous improvement in resource efficiency as measured by the Field to Market sustainability metrics.
Second Party Verified

We worked with Syngenta to capture field level data from 8 producers to better understand sustainability outcomes.  We met annually to review aggregated reporting, share individual grower reports, hear from expert speakers, engage in small group discussions, etc.  We have demonstrated continuous improvement in some indicators but not others, and have added practice based surveys where needed.  We have provided thank you gifts for growers and are now engaging with them and supplier partners to chart out plans for 2021 crop and beyond. 

Connect to soil health and regenerative agriculture initiatives in the region.
Second Party Verified

We worked with Syngenta to capture field level data from 8 producers to better understand sustainability outcomes.  We met annually to review aggregated reporting, share individual grower reports, hear from expert speakers, engage in small group discussions, etc.  We have demonstrated continuous improvement in some indicators but not others, and have added practice based surveys where needed.  We have provided thank you gifts for growers and are now engaging with them and supplier partners to chart out plans for 2021 crop and beyond. 

Participants

Project Lead Organization(s)
General Mills, Inc.
Syngenta Corporation

Project Details

Status
Complete
Pathway
Insight
Natural Resource Concern
Counties the project is located in:

Contact