Carbon Marketing: Agroforestry and CSR
Agroforestry is an excellent practice for food, beverage, and agricultural brands looking to build brand equity and offset emissions.
Cattle graze a black locust & black walnut silvopasture in Watkins Glen, New York. Angus Glen Farm is a commercial beef farm.
We humans feel a sense of obligation to steward our grasslands, forests, and oceans. Covering the earth’s surface with complex vegetation and biodiversity can feel daunting – but it’s actionable. And we can regenerate in a way that complements agriculture and human thriving. Agroforestry is a suite of regenerative agriculture practices that amount to planting useful trees on farmland, and it makes for a golden trifecta in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and carbon objectives: Strategy, Marketing, and Values.
Strategy – First off, it makes sense to look into one’s own supply chain, in search of ways to reduce emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere. Amazon can increase delivery fleet efficiency, and McDonalds’ beef supply chain can increase cattle weight gain in a way that also sequesters carbon, via managed grazing and silvopasture (trees for cattle shade).
Marketing – Industrial agriculture isn’t always aesthetically pleasing. Companies often seek to convey social and environmental responsibility, and humans understand stories and images better than we can grasp statistics. A company’s marketing budget is often the first pool of capital with which they approach carbon offsetting, and agroforestry is a perennial source of content that appeals to the side of us that becomes spellbound by drone shots of a wildebeest stampede, a humpback whale breaching, or a gibbon floating across the treetops.
Values – It’s safe to say that Dr. Bronners and Guayakí feel a strong sense of stewardship, investing in their own supply chain. Outside of mission-driven organizations, businesses mainly work to drive profit. For those that are buying carbon credits when they do not have to: this speaks to their values. They are legitimately paying for societal good, outside of building brand equity. Microsoft falls into this category.
Companies often purchase carbon incrementally, in order to understand the process and make progress toward emissions reductions or net zero targets. In the case that it becomes requisite, firms can have suppliers lined up and be ready to transact further. In the interim, there is a great deal of efficiency and differentiation that brands can create from leaning into agroforestry. The best carbon strategies also create supply chain efficiencies and marketing collateral.
A carbon strategy is likely to gain momentum if is operationally strategic, creates marketing collateral, is driven by stewardship and obligation. We’ve seen the progression from charity carbon to holistic, strategic carbon.
Cattle graze a willow and hybrid poplar riparian silvopasture in the Paraná River Delta, just north of Buenos Aires. The trees are harvested for timber.
It is important to note that products with ESG-related claims have seen 8% higher growth, relative to standard products – and legitimate, substantiated claims serve to quell fears of greenwashing. False ESG claims are increasingly frowned upon by the social contract, while Europe moves to make greenwashing illegal.
“Your carbon plan should fit with the rest of your company.”
Buying carbon largely is often a component of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR amounts to creating value for a company’s stakeholders (all those that interact with the business), outside of driving returns for shareholders. CSR does not need to be zero-sum between planet and profit, and it shouldn’t be.
CSR Fit is defined by whether a CSR initiative aligns with the company’s core competencies, operations, and products & services. Initiatives with good CSR fit are often proactive and not reactive.
CSR Skepticism (or cynicism) occurs when a company does something that doesn’t fit – when an initiative is lukewarm, flops, or backfires. McDonald’s McPlant hamburger didn’t go anywhere, Pepsi’s ad featuring Kendall Jenner was seen to trivialize civil rights, and BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebrand was seen as a gaping discrepancy between words and actions. Ideally, a CSR initiative has great CSR fit, and thus creates organic, rooted inertia against CSR skepticism. Your carbon plan should fit with the rest of the company.
CSR is not charity, and it should be embedded. The classic interpretation of CSR was that it just amounted to charity, and this created a great deal of skepticism. The early 2000’s had us focus on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. This was a good progression, but often pushed companies to silo the three buckets: perhaps touting returns that were derived from ignoring water pollution in their supply chain, but then paying to clean up a river in a different geography.
The shared value framework amounts to taking a more holistic view on a business’ value chain, and leaning in where the firm actually has leverage. The best CSR and carbon strategies occur where values, strategy, and marketing align. This trifecta can also strengthen the additionality of the a project: the UN guidelines for additionality explicitly state that if a funder of an agroforestry system will only invest if that purchase generates carbon credits, then this constitutes a component of financial additionality.
Agroforestry is an excellent place to act for food, beverage, and agricultural brands looking to offset emissions.
On the values axis: Trees can allow us to produce food for people, while creating thriving ecosystems. As far as strategy goes: cattle with access to tree shade gain 60% more weight on hot days, shrubs protect pastured chickens from hawks, and silvopasture operations have higher job satisfaction and lower employee turnover. Multiple operations on the same acreage allow farms to diversify their income, from elderberry syrup, to fence posts grown on-farm. Lastly, trees can tell the marketing story on their own. They allow a brand to be aesthetically robust and co-innovative with their customers and peers.
Silvopasture and agroforestry can be features of commercial farming operations that yield CSR value across the board, given diligent planning and implementation. Propagate serves to make planting and managing trees easy, efficient, and profitable. If trees on farms seem like a value-add for a brand or business you’re involved with, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Pastured organic laying hens explore elderberries on a farm in Kentucky. As the elderberries grow larger, they provide cover from hawks and general comfort for the chickens.
Sir David Attenborough’s iconic voice narrates: "It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living." We are mesmerized by Planet Earth, and then return to the office, the gym, the dinner with friends and family, and ask: “How can we live an abundant and examined life? Where do I play in, on this vast blue planet?”