Helping growers on the regen ag journey

After an 18-month ‘learning journey’ to find out what farmers needed to adopt regenerative agriculture practices, innocent Drinks launched the Farmer Innovation Fund in 2021 to ‘de-risk’ the transition. The business had found that while there was some funding available for smallholders, commercial farmers were reliant on government funding, which is time consuming and difficult to acquire. Having started with a grant of £100,000, this year it increased to £1M, available to its suppliers globally.

innocent offers three types of funding: micro grants, (focus groups, conducting life cycle assessments or research to try and understand the barriers to regen ag); on farm trials (e.g. for installing solar panels, looking at irrigation or precision farming equipment); and commercial scale farm trials. Most grantees are using micro-grants and on-farm trial grants but in the future, innocent wants to help farmers with multi-year projects. This year, 10 winning applicants were selected in June.

As well as financial support, innocent organises webinars and sends newsletters to share best practice between suppliers. In a few years’ time, the plan is to share those best practices with the wider industry.

Estelle Gayout explains more about the funding…

Q. Why is regen ag important to innocent?

A: It’s a huge focus for us because 57% of our carbon emissions come from the ingredients that we buy and use in our drinks – that’s from growing the ingredients, squashing them, and transporting them. It’s a big challenge but also a great opportunity to start working on how we can improve the resilience within our own supply chain.

We all are aware of the challenges of climate change, so we have a responsibility as a business to try to invest today. And we might not see the results tomorrow or next year, but we know we need to do something to try and safeguard the future of fruit and veg for generations to come.

Q. What types of projects qualify?

A: Anything around regen ag and specifically low carbon farming and higher biodiversity. Some of the projects, for example, are working specifically on pollination, looking at including wildflower strips and measuring the amount of pollinators on site, but also the different type of species.

We’ve got a separate flagship biodiversity project called The Beacon Project, and we’ve been working with the University of Reading and some Spanish research institutes to look at the role of wild pollinators in apple farms in Spain. It’s looking at making sure the amount of wildflowers is helping attract more pollinators, so we can reduce pesticides and fertilisers.

Some of the results have come up already and we’ve seen up to a 67% increase in wild pollinators on site. If we continue that way, we could see an increase of 30% of apples on the farm. It’s a really interesting project that we’ve been running for the last three years.

Q. What are some examples of successful projects?

A: Pixley Berries are our UK blackcurrant supplier and they’ve been having some issues with the climate recently – from frost to extreme sunshine, which was leading to some burn on the crops. So they are applying a biostimulant and looking at some sensory devices to see what the impact of the biostimulant is on the plant. What they’re hoping to see is an increase in leaf coverage which will protect the fruit when it is exposed to the sun prior to harvest. It’s a three-year project and this year is the very beginning, with £25,000 grant funding per year.

And in Spain, they’re starting to work on, first of all, a life cycle assessment of strawberries. It’s an area where they’re very much suffering from droughts so they’re going to be using a new on demand drip irrigation system. From the initial studies it can reduce water use by up to 15%.

Q. What’s next for the fund?

A: We’re trying to increase the pot of money in the next few years, so hopefully in 2–3 years’ time we will have £2–3 million. We’re also planning on opening the fund a little bit earlier this time, around beginning of February 2025, because some of the feedback we received was that our window was just too short. We had six weeks and so we’re increasing it to 10 weeks this time.

Meet our expert

Estelle Gayout joined innocent in 2022, with over 10 years’ experience in sustainability communications and corporate social responsibility roles. In her current role she is responsible for leading the management of the Farmer Innovation Fund.

Since its launch in 1999 innocent has grown from a small West London start-up, to a multi-faceted business present in over 18 markets globally. It’s B Corp certified and gives 10% of profits to good causes.

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