Natural pet food brand NUTRO™, a part of the Mars family of brands, has officially announced the winners of this year’s Soil Growth Grants totaling $300,000.
Understood to be a part of NUTRO’s GREATER GROUND™ initiative, these Soil Growth Grants are specifically conceived to empower farmers, across the NUTRO™ supply network, with the transition costs needed to implement healthy soil practices.
According to certain reports, the revealed winners included Megan Bishop of Bishop Farms, Trey Hill of Harborview Farms, and Tyler Zimmerman of Zimmerman Farms. As for how the winners will use the newly-secured funds, they all are going to dedicate the money towards purchasing equipment and/or covering crop seed that will help them implement healthy soil practices on their respective farms.
Talk about each winner’s plan on a slightly deeper level, though, we begin from Bishop Farms. Bishop Farms will leverage the fresh cash inflow to fund the purchase of cover crop seed and a broadcast spreader, which happens to be a versatile tool capable of distributing cover crop seeds into current crops or after the harvest of the cash crop. You see, by integrating cover crops, Bishop will effectively support soil health, including its ability to help absorb and retain carbon.
Next up, there is Harborview Farms, who will deploy the funds to purchase a 60-foot roller crimper to help manage cover crop residue. This roller crimper, when left on the field, can help suppress weeds, conserve moisture, as well as improve soil structure. This builds upon Harborview’s already-impressive track record of advocating for soil health.
Then, we have Zimmerman Farms, who is going to invest its grant to purchase a roller crimper and cover crop seed. This device will allow the farm to scale up cover crop implementation and more efficiently terminate the cover crop and prepare the soil for subsequent crops. In essence, Zimmerman follows the cover crop with polycropping, a method of planting multiple crops together and mimicking natural ecosystems by introducing diversity into a field.
Launched by the NUTRO brand on World Soil Day in 2022, the GREATER GROUND initiative is designed to raise awareness about the importance of healthy soil and encourage select farmers to adopt healthy soil practices. Under the given setup, NUTRO made available a total of $5 million for facilitating the implementation of healthy soil practices through 2027.
More on the same would reveal how, each year, this program offers financial support through Soil Growth Grants to help selected farmers with the transition costs needed to implement healthy soil practices. For 2023, NUTRO awarded what was the inaugural inaugural Soil Growth Grant to Schiff Farms Inc., a grant worth $150,000 which was used to purchase of an inter-seeder, an innovative tool that helps plant cover crops among their cash crops.
Among other things, we ought to mention that NUTRO is collaborating with two suppliers, who are participants in the GREATER GROUND Soil Scholarship trainings and on-farm data collection. These suppliers are Healthy Food Ingredients, LLC (HFI), a key supplier of barley for NUTRO products, and Anchor Ingredients, a strategic partner supplying some of the peas, oats, barley, and flax for NUTRO. Together, the organizations will work to generate better knowledge of soil health status on farms throughout their networks.
Beyond that, NUTRO is also working with Understanding Ag to facilitate training and mentorship for GREATER GROUND Soil Scholarships. By the end of 2024, 108 individual farmers will have received training through the program.
