Sustainable Agriculture

Promoting responsible farming and supply chain practices

Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable members define sustainable agriculture as the responsible stewardship of farming while balancing these three critical dimensions:

• Business value
• Environmental and social impacts
• Need for unique ingredients

Balancing these key issues requires a unique vision and commitment to our sustainable future. Below, you’ll find the challenges members face, current best practices, and future outlooks.

Jump to our vision for sustainable agriculture, our theories put into practice, and the key questions we are asking.

Defining the Challenge

Agriculture is an essential component to most beverage production, making sustainable practices a critical area of focus for BIER members. Because members have diverse product lines and circumstances, a number of factors informed our efforts to create a streamlined definition. These include members’:

• Heterogeneous supply chains, with differing raw ingredients in various geographic regions;
• Varied grower engagement, ranging from individual farmers to large suppliers;
• Challenges of physically connecting with a large number of farmers;
• Data scarcity;
• Need to preserve supply continuity and resiliency;
• Ongoing task of managing stakeholder expectations;
• The core need to maintain product quality; and
• Need for more proven methods to efficiently measure results.

BIER members navigate these complexities on a daily basis and recognize that any useful, actionable definition of sustainable agriculture must take these challenges into account in order to drive change.

What is Sustainable Agriculture? A New Vision

In response to these challenges, BIER has created a working framework for sustainable agriculture that acknowledges complexity by incorporating business values, ingredient categories, and relevant environmental and social dimensions:

These three streams of sustainable agriculture must be recognized by global organizations when crafting solutions for farming and minimizing negative impacts. Sustainable agriculture’s best solutions are complex blends of the three streams, and we believe companies striving for the greatest impact in their production processes will interweave these into planning and practice.

For BIER, this definition framework provides clarity, insight, and direction to our work in developing tools and conducting research in sustainable agriculture, helping to accelerate learning and implementation of best practices.

Theory into Practice

BIER members have increasingly embraced a myriad of opportunities related to sustainable agriculture and regenerative agriculture, and are individually and collectively making demonstrable progress, with more yet to come. BIER members employ a number of best practices;​

• Engaging with agricultural ingredient suppliers to understand business drivers for change, deliver training on practices, review key performance indicators (KPIs), and share knowledge and experience;
• Creating targeted stakeholder engagement and cooperation in water-stressed locations, and reducing water use;
• Reducing pesticide applications by a variety of means, including alternating crop rows;
• Adjusting land use to restore and enhance biodiversity;
• Incorporating technology to better optimize water and nutrient applications;
• Switching to native regional crops;
• Using facility compost as a natural fertilizer;
• Reducing reliance on fuel-based farm equipment;
• Applying the principles of organic and bio-dynamic agriculture; and
• Sharing best practices between member companies and beyond.