Farming for the Future

UPL is an international provider of sustainable agricultural solutions. It was established in India in 1969 and over more than 50 years has grown to become the world’s fifth largest agricultural solutions company. Today it has a global reach extending into more than 138 countries, with access to more than 90% of the world’s food basket. Nonetheless, UPL is not resting on its laurels.

FROM INDIA TO THE WORLD

Mike Frank, CEO of UPL Corporation, describes where the company is today and how it’s leveraging that to tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues: “We offer a full range of sustainable agricultural products and solutions spanning high performing seeds, biosolutions, traditional crop protection products, pre- and post-harvest solutions, and soil and water technologies – each of which helps farmers overcome their challenges, and grow healthy crops. We have 44 manufacturing facilities so we’re very much back-integrated as a company. We don’t just buy products from somebody and sell them. Due to our history, most of our back-integration is in India, which makes us unique in a world where most ag-input companies are based in or supplied from China. We also have 25 R&D facilities and over 14,000 registrations so as a company we have access to a wide range of technology and innovation.

“This deep investment in technology, paired with our Indian heritage, has put us in an excellent position to work with smallholder farmers around the world. India has a very large agricultural base but most of the farmers are small-scale, as is the case in many of the regions in which we now operate. Since the beginning of our journey, and throughout our growth, we’ve focused uniquely on developing and distributing technologies and solutions suited to smallholder farming communities. For example In India, and to a lesser extent in parts of Africa and South East Asia, growers typically burn their paddy stubble in winter months as a quick and efficient way of clearing fields before planting wheat crop. But burning this stubble releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere, with a hazardous impact on public health outcomes, and also depletes soil nutrients. So last year through our ag-tech subsidiary nurture.farm we launched the Crop Residue Management program, partnering with the Indian Agricultural Research Institute to make available to farmers a bio-decomposer which breaks the stubble down so it doesn’t need to be burned, and deployed 700 boom sprayers to service their land free of charge.

“In the first year of the program we enrolled 25,000 farmers across 420,000 acres in northern India for this service and it was extremely successful. We saw 92% farmer compliance, over 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions prevented, and farmers found that, by returning the carbon into the soil, they had richer and healthier soils that helped create better crops this year.”