This article is published as part of America’s Conservation Ag Movement, which supports farmers and ranchers in building profitable, resilient futures for their operations.
As the challenges facing agriculture grow more complex – from climate variability to shifting market dynamics – growers are increasingly looking for crop inputs that help produce abundant, healthy crops while safeguarding the land they steward.
Valent U.S.A. recently unveiled a new tool to help growers ensure that the inputs they are using to protect their crops act like silver bullets rather than shotguns. Through the Sustainable Solutions Portfolio, Valent has centered 47 broad-spectrum products that make up convention biorational and botanical products that cover both conventional and organic agriculture.
Validated by a third-party, the Sustainable Solutions Criteria aligns the company’s products with Sustainable Development Goals laid out by the United Nations in 2000, specifically around impacts to people, planet and productivity.
“Our parent company, Sumitomo Chemical, was one of the first companies globally to partner with the UN to support the SDGs and we have embraced five of those for our businesses in the U.S.,” says Matt Plitt, President & CEO.
Doubling Down on Sustainability
In January, Tiffany Dean joined Valent as vice-president of sustainable solutions, a move aimed at further threading this focus throughout the business.
While Dean has a large focus for the organization, for her, it all begins on the farm, where she says the organization is hyper-focused.
“Growers want to do right by their farms, by their soil and by their ecosystem,” she says. “They also want to make sure they’re maximizing profitability and productivity at the end of the day.”
Listening to growers and the organization’s channel partners in the retail space is how the company keeps that focus.
“We are hyper-engaged with growers because we know that they have a lot of challenges and opportunities to address,” Dean says. “We want to make sure that the solutions that we have today and the solutions that we have tomorrow are going to bring them value, so they can maximize inputs and ensure that that soil is going to be productive today and tomorrow.”
Innovation Through Sustainability
Over the next decade, Dean expects that the company will roll 20 new products into the market, the result of an arduous decades-long process to develop and gain registration for new agriculture inputs.
She says that the company’s “North Star” in that process is also the same one they use for their entire business – sustainability.
“We want to bring products into the market that are going to be the most beneficial to the grower and to the environment,” she says, adding that the majority of those new products are going be around the company’s plant growth regulator platform, but will also include seed treatments and herbicides.
“We have much innovation, investment and excitement around the Sustainable Solutions Portfolio,” she says. “But we need to make sure that we are using the grower as the voice of how we drive our business moving forward.”
Betting On Sustainable Productivity
Valent’s Sustainable Solutions Criteria ends with productivity and Dean says it is not lost on her how critical it is right now for America’s working lands to be working both at peak capacity and peak efficiency. The team is working to ensure that products in the Portfolio are optimized as well.
“Input costs are under an extreme amount of pressure right now, and so we want to make sure that growers are maximizing those input costs and gaining the benefit of everything that they are purchasing,” she says. “Through our biorational, our biological and our conventional portfolio we’re able to bring products that allows the grower to maximize their productivity while also not sacrificing the environmental aspects as well.”
In the short term, Dean says she is focused on listening so that she can build strategy for innovation that takes all of these factors into account for conservation at the farm-gate.
“We need to continue engaging with our customers and our partners to understand what is needed from growers, what’s needed from the value chain, and what’s needed at the end of the day to make sure that producers are continuing to maximize their productivity and profitability and are able to use our products to benefit them in many ways possible,” she says.
America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at americasconservationagmovement.com.
