Achieving considerate growth

Sustainability is at the heart of every action Agrocrops takes.

With its global scale, Agrocrops recognises its responsibility and the opportunities for being a catalyst for change, driving widespread change with sustainable sourcing to protect scarce resources, improve livelihoods, and build both product quality and brand awareness.

Building on our long-term commitment to sustainable sourcing, we are focusing on peanut crops that have the biggest positive impact on nature. We work with a range of stakeholders to help develop internationally recognised standards and verification systems like Fairtrade and GAP.

We also work with smallhold to large-scale farmers and suppliers for sustainable sourcing. Wherever possible, we’re seeking better visibility on the ground, which gives us and our stakeholders added confidence that the crops in our supply chain are sustainably grown.

There is a key role to be played in the biodiversity and ecosystem of our industry to improve transparency and traceability, and support farmers – especially smallholders – to adopt more sustainable practices.

With this in mind, we work hand in hand with farmers, NGOs, our suppliers, other agri-businesses and governments with the aim of contributing to the development of international standards which recognise farmers and suppliers for their efforts.

We’re also working to address and ensure that any adverse effects on soil fertility, water and air quality, and biodiversity from agricultural activities are minimised, and positive contributions are made where possible. Finally, we also work to enable local communities to protect and improve their well-being and environment.

Agrocrops is committed to putting seeds in the ground, and food in people’s mouths. That’s why we have a “No Hunger” pledge that runs through everything we do. 

We work with farmer producer organisations and seed breeders to trial and test new high-yield seed varieties.. Our work and association with ICRISAT have enabled us to try the highest-yield type

Our focus on sourcing aims to cut out the middlemen and source directly from farmers – thereby leaving a larger part of the profit in the farmers hands. 

This work that we do alongside small-scale farmer groups helps to provide them with training, quality seeds, and other resources that they need to improve their livelihoods. 

We believe that our continual investment in safety, health, quality, and supporting sustainability is essential to delivering quality products. We aim to upgrade equipment and technology such as laboratory testing equipment, metal detectors, screens, and colour laser sorting. 

Our approach to “No Hunger” is multifold. Agrocrops help to tackle the hunger problems of the society we operate in by directly providing free food to the needy. To do this, we collaborate with organisations that are focused on providing food and shelter to people in need, such as orphans and the elderly. 

Agrocrops also invests time and effort to upskill workers to give them employment opportunities and thereby make a decent living. By providing a better standard of education, Agrocrops is able to help nurture people’s talent and boost their employability.

Agrocrops sponsors child education for all of its employees to ensure that the children of both unskilled and skilled/blue- and white-collar employees receive a high-quality education. This is because we strongly believe that education is a simple remedy to alleviate poverty in our society.

Apart from sponsoring the children of our employees, Agrocrops also assists with school and university sponsorships which aim to help underprivileged students. At present, our education programme is only implemented in India. But going forward, Agrocrops will be expanding this type of support to other regions in which it operates, such as Africa.

Access to quality education has been a major bottleneck for disadvantaged communities, especially in rural setups, in their quest for economic growth, which is why we participate in programmes that provide infrastructural support to state primary schools, as well as basic supplies such as textbooks and notebooks, sports kits, stationary, etc.

Attaining equality is a large part of Agrocrops’ strategy towards boosting female empowerment.
We hire unskilled women in our workforce and upskill them to manage the manufacturing and distribution of our consumer products. Meaning that our peanut oil, peanut snacks, and several other peanut-based products are being produced by an all-female workforce.

Agrocrops also prioritises working with first-generation female peanut farmers and supports teams of female farmers by providing them with the tools they need to succeed – such as quality seeds, fertilisers, and expertise.
Our overarching goal is to ensure that women feel supported, valued, and respected.

In the agricultural industry, communities that cultivate and process our raw materials are working to change the economic, social, and cultural outlook for women by teaching them the skills that are required to increase farms’ productivity, build better businesses, and improve livelihoods.

Bringing women into the financial mainstream by equipping them with livelihood skills, market linkages, funding, and seed or input support, as well as other opportunities, helps to boost gender equality and the empowerment of women.
This in turn helps to form community engagement projects that work with women's self-help groups (FPOs) across rural India for entrepreneurship and enterprise development.

Agrocrops supplies several UNICEF-recognised suppliers who manufacture food for malnourished children. We take pride in supplying raw peanut ingredients with high food safety standards to UNICEF-nominated manufacturers. We have also committed to sharing 25% of the margins earned to sponsor education to the lower-income groups of the society we operate in.

Agrocrops’ approach to ESG goals is knitted into our business model, instead of being part of a parallel process.

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), in collaboration with national partners in India, the Directorate of Groundnut Research (ICAR-DGR) and State Agricultural Universities (SAUs), developed and commercialised high-oleic groundnut varieties to meet market needs.

The high-oleic groundnuts are bred in Spanish and Virginia bunch growth habits which are suitable for cultivation in Asia and Africa. The oleic acid concentration in high-oleic groundnuts is 80+2% as against 45-50% in normal groundnuts. Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS) and Marker-Assisted Backcross (MABC) approaches were used for early-generation selection of FAD mutant alleles.

After prioritising the development of high-oleic groundnut varieties to meet market needs in India, a breeding programme was initiated in 2011, resulting in the commercialisation of two high-oleic cultivars in India: Girnar 4 (ICGV 15083) and Grinar 5 (ICGV 15090).

Agrocrops, working with ICRISAT and ICAR, ventured into commercial farming of this seed type with over 3,000 farmers including an all-female farmer producer organisation. We aim to create a larger supply of this seed type so that farmer yields are improved to a greater extent.

With mounting climate-fuelled weather disasters, social inequality, species extinctions and resource scarcity, some corporations have adopted sustainability programmes.

One term in this realm is “circular economy”, in which practitioners aim to increase the efficiency and reuse of resources, including water. Pumping out groundwater when rivers run low further depletes surface water because the two are linked.

Erecting dams to provide water to one group of people deprives other people and ecosystems. Placing levees on rivers and building on wetlands removes space for water to flow, pushing flooding into neighbouring areas. Paving cities and whisking water away creates localised scarcity.

Agrocrops identified the peanut-growing regions and the communities that thrive on this crop and started to implement projects that enable rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge.

These projects also aim to conserve and regenerate natural ecosystems which have been depleted through the existing mono-crop agriculture on site. Ensuring that it has a net-positive environmental impact.

Moreover, water and agriculture systems work in combination, rather than in isolation. As a result, the residents will be able to thrive and enjoy reliable sources of water for agriculture and their general livelihoods.