Innovations To Make Agriculture More Productive And More Sustainable
Few things are more important than farming. We depend on it for food, feed, fuel and fiber. It’s crucial to the world’s economy and to our very existence. This thought energizes our entire business and our innovation spirit. We are a business built on innovation with more than 100 years’ experience in agriculture. We continue to advance our scientific discoveries and farm innovations, ensuring the future availability of ever more sustainable agricultural solutions and thus also providing the means for farmers to produce even more sustainably.
How do we produce enough food for our growing population, while maintaining Earth's natural resources for future generations? Crop protection and new crop varieties, also based on new breeding technologies, provide sustainable solutions developed through rigorous research into risks and benefits.
Innovations to balance Earth’s natural resources and future generations
Over the past decades, society and customers increasingly value sustainability and want to understand the contribution of BASF’s agricultural business. For many years now, we have implemented across BASF a method for the development of sustainable products, what we call Sustainable Solution Steering. This relates in particular to the integration of sustainability criteria in the early stages of our research and development process. Through this process we aim to increase our sales share of agricultural solutions with substantial contribution to sustainability by 7%. This will contribute significantly to BASF Group's target of €22 billion in sales by 2025. In an industry leading step, we’ve annually entered our Sustainable Solution Steering methods and portfolio for independent auditing to ensure that we are making progress in achieving essential milestones towards sustainable farming.
To achieve our sustainability targets, our research and development efforts begin by identifying and anticipating current and future customer needs. We then innovate through broad discovery, development and formulation, application technology, and biotechnology leveraging the BASF Verbund. We evaluate product performance, regulatory profile and societal acceptance together and early so that our products can be used reliably and safely.
Focused on making an impact on agricultural productivity and sustainability, we will bring more than 30 major R&D projects from our innovation pipeline to the market by 2030. These much needed innovations for farmers worldwide include novel seeds and traits, crop protection products and digital solutions that manage diseases, weeds, pests and resources while reducing land-use, use rates as well as number of applications. This is how we meet the needs of our customers and contribute to sustainable agriculture for today’s and tomorrow’s generations alike.
